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whileiamdying · 1 year ago

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Tony Bennett, Jazzy Crooner of the American Songbook, Is Dead at 96

From his initial success at the Paramount in Times Square through his generation-spanning duets, his career was remarkable for both its longevity and its consistency.

By Bruce Weber

July 21, 2023

Tony Bennett, a singer whose melodic clarity, jazz-influenced phrasing, audience-embracing persona and warm, deceptively simple interpretations of musical standards helped spread the American songbook around the world and won him generations of fans, died on Friday at his home of many decades in Manhattan. He was 96.

His publicist, Sylvia Weiner, announced his death.

Mr. Bennett learned he had Alzheimer’s disease in 2016, his wife, Susan Benedetto, told AARP The Magazine in February 2021. But he continued to perform and record despite his illness; his last public performance was in August 2021, when he appeared with Lady Gaga at Radio City Music Hall in a show titled “One Last Time.”

Mr. Bennett’s career of more than 70 years was remarkable not only for its longevity, but also for its consistency. In hundreds of concerts and club dates and more than 150 recordings, he devoted himself to preserving the classic American popular song, as written by Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington, Rodgers and Hammerstein and others.

From his initial success as a jazzy crooner who wowed audiences at the Paramount in Times Square in the early 1950s, through his late-in-life duets with younger singers gleaned from a range of genres and generations — most notably Lady Gaga, with whom he recorded albums in 2014 and 2021 and toured in 2015 — he was an active promoter of both songwriting and entertaining as timeless, noble pursuits.

Mr. Bennett stubbornly resisted record producers who urged gimmick songs on him, or, in the 1960s and early ’70s, who were sure that rock ’n’ roll had relegated the music he preferred to a dusty bin perused only by a dwindling population of the elderly and nostalgic.

Instead, he followed in the musical path of the greatest American pop singers of the 20th century — Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra — and carried the torch for them into the 21st. He reached the height of stardom in 1962 with a celebrated concert at Carnegie Hall and the release of his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” And though he saw his popularity wane with the onset of rock and his career went through a trough in the 1970s, when professional difficulties were exacerbated by a failing marriage and drug problems, he was, in the end, more than vindicated in his musical judgment.

“I wanted to sing the great songs, songs that I felt really mattered to people,” he said in “The Good Life” (1998), an autobiography written with Will Friedwald.

It’s hard to overstate Mr. Bennett’s lasting appeal. He was still singing “San Francisco” — which led many people to think he was a native of that city, though he was actually a through-and-through New Yorker — more than half a century later. He sang on Ed Sullivan’s show and David Letterman’s. He sang with Rosemary Clooney when she was in her 20s, and Celine Dion when she was in her 20s.

He made his film debut in 1966, in a critically reviled Hollywood story, “The Oscar,” playing a man betrayed by an old friend. And though he did not pursue an acting career, decades later he was playing himself in movies like the Robert De Niro-Billy Crystal gangster comedy “Analyze This” and the Jim Carrey vehicle “Bruce Almighty.” He was 64 when he appeared as a cartoon version of himself on “The Simpsons.” He was 82 when he appeared on the HBO series “Entourage,” performing one of his trademark songs, “The Good Life.”

A lifelong liberal Democrat, Mr. Bennett participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, and, along with Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr. and others, performed at the Stars for Freedom rally on the City of St. Jude campus on the outskirts of Montgomery on March 24, the night before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the address that came to be known as the “How Long? Not Long” speech. At the conclusion of the march, Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer from Michigan, drove Mr. Bennett to the airport; she was murdered later that day by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Mr. Bennett also performed for Nelson Mandela, then the president of South Africa, during his state visit to England in 1996. He sang at the White House for John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, and at Buckingham Palace at Queen Elizabeth II’s 50th anniversary jubilee.

An ‘Elusive’ Voice

He won his first two Grammy Awards, for “San Francisco,” in 1963, and his last, for the album “Love for Sale,” with Lady Gaga, last year. Altogether there were 20 of them, including, in 2001, a lifetime achievement award. By some estimates, he sold more than 60 million records.

The talent that spawned this success and popularity was not so easy to define. Neither a fluid singer nor an especially powerful one, he did not have the mellifluous timbre of Crosby or the rakish swing of Sinatra. If Armstrong’s tone was distinctively gravelly, Mr. Bennett’s wasn’t quite; “sandy” was more like it. Almost no one denied that his voice was appealing, but critics strove mightily to describe it, and then to justify its appeal.

“The voice that is the basic tool of Mr. Bennett’s trade is small, thin and somewhat hoarse,” John S. Wilson wrote in The New York Times in 1962. “But he uses it shrewdly and with a skillful lack of pretension.”

In a 1974 profile, Whitney Balliett, the longtime jazz critic for The New Yorker, called Mr. Bennett “an elusive singer.”

“He can be a belter who reaches rocking fortissimos,” Mr. Balliett wrote. “He drives a ballad as intensely and intimately as Sinatra. He can be a lilting, glancing jazz singer. He can be a low-key, searching supper-club performer.” But, he added, “Bennett’s voice binds all his vocal selves together.”

Most simply, perhaps, the composer and critic Alec Wilder said about Mr. Bennett’s voice, “There is a quality about it that lets you in.”

Indeed, what many listeners (including the critics) discovered about Mr. Bennett, and what they responded to, was something intangible: the care with which he treated both the song and the audience.

He had a storyteller’s grace with a lyric, a jazzman’s sureness with a melody, and in his finest performances he delivered them with a party giver’s welcome, a palpable and infectious affability. In his presentation, the songs he loved and sang — “Just in Time,” “The Best Is Yet to Come,” “Rags to Riches” and “I Wanna Be Around,” to name a handful of his emblematic hits — became engaging, life-embracing parables.

Frank Sinatra, whom Mr. Bennett counted as a mentor and friend, once put it another way.

“For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business,” he told Life magazine in 1965. “He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.”

Mr. Bennett passed through life with as unscathed a public image as it is possible for a celebrity to have. Finding even mild criticism of him in reviews and interviews is no mean feat, and even his outspoken liberalism generally failed to attract vitriol from the right. (An exception was his call, after the drug-related deaths of Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston, for the legalization of drugs, a view loudly denounced by William J. Bennett, the former drug czar, among others.)

With the possible exception of his former wives, everyone, it seemed, loved Tony Bennett. Skeptical journalists would occasionally try to pierce what they perceived as his perfect veneer, but they generally discovered that there wasn’t much to pierce.

“Bennett is outrageous,” Simon Hattenstone, a reporter for The Guardian, wrote in 2002. “He mythologizes himself, name-drops every time he opens his mouth, directs you to his altruism, is self-congratulatory to the point of indecency. He should be intolerable, but he’s one of the sweetest, most humble men I’ve ever met.”

Son of Queens

Anthony Dominick Benedetto was born on Aug. 3, 1926, in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, and grew up in that borough in working-class Astoria. His father, Giovanni, had emigrated from Calabria, in southern Italy, at age 11. His mother, Anna (Suraci) Benedetto, was born in New York in 1899, having made the sea journey from Italy in the womb. Their marriage was arranged. Giovanni and Anna were cousins; their mothers were sisters.

In New York, where Giovanni Benedetto became John, he was a grocer, but beleaguered by poor health and often unable to work. Anna was a factory seamstress and took in additional sewing to support the family. Anthony was their third child, their second son, and the first of any Benedetto to be born in a hospital. Giovanni, who sang Italian folk songs to his children — “My father inspired my love for music,” Mr. Bennett wrote in his autobiography — died when Anthony was 10.

Anthony sang from an early age, and drew and painted, too. He would become a creditable painter as an adult, mostly landscapes and still lifes in watercolors and oils and portraits of musicians he admired, signing his paintings “Benedetto.” His first music teacher arranged for him to sing alongside Mayor Fiorello La Guardia at the opening of the Triborough Bridge (now the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge) in 1936.

For a time he attended the High School for Industrial Arts (now called the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan, but he never graduated. He dropped out and found work as a copy boy for The Associated Press, in a laundry and as an elevator operator.

“I couldn’t figure out how to get the elevator to stop at the right place,” he recalled. “People ended up having to crawl out between floors.”

At night he performed at amateur shows and worked as a singing waiter. He had just begun to get paying work as a singer, using the stage name Joe Bari, when he was drafted.

He arrived in Europe toward the end of World War II, serving in Germany in the infantry. He spent time on the front lines, an experience he described as “a front-row seat in hell,” and was among the troops who arrived to liberate the prisoners at the Landsberg concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau.

After Germany surrendered, Mr. Bennett was part of the occupying forces, assigned to special services, where he ended up as a singer with Army bands and for a time was featured in a ragtag version of the musical “On the Town” — directed by Arthur Penn, who would go on to direct “Bonnie and Clyde” and other notable movies — in the opera house in Wiesbaden.

He returned to New York in August 1946 and set about beginning a career as a musician. On the G.I. Bill, he took classes at the American Theater Wing, which he later said helped teach him how to tell a story in song. He sang in nightclubs in Manhattan and Queens.

A series of breaks followed. He appeared on the radio show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” the “American Idol” of its day. (The competition was won by Rosemary Clooney.) There are different versions of the biggest break in Mr. Bennett’s early career, but as he told it in “The Good Life,” he had been singing occasionally at a club in Greenwich Village where the owner had offered Pearl Bailey a gig as the headliner; she agreed, but only on the condition that Joe Bari stayed on the bill.

When Bob Hope came down to take in Ms. Bailey’s act, he liked Joe Bari so much that he asked him to open for him at the Paramount Theater. Hope had a condition, however: He didn’t like the name Joe Bari, and insisted it be changed. Dismissing the name Anthony Benedetto as too long to fit on a marquee, Hope christened the young singer Tony Bennett.

The Hits Roll In

The producer Mitch Miller signed Mr. Bennett to Columbia Records in 1950; “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was his first single. Miller was known for his hit-making prowess, a gift that often involved matching talented singers with novelty songs or having them cover hits by others, for which he was criticized by more serious music fans and sometimes by the singers themselves.

He and Mr. Bennett had a contentious relationship. Mr. Bennett resisted his attempts at gimmickry; Miller, who believed that the producer and not the singer was in charge of a recording, applied his authority. Still, together they achieved grand success.

By mid-1951, Mr. Bennett had his first No. 1 hit, “Because of You.” That same year, his version of the Hank Williams ballad “Cold, Cold Heart” also hit No. 1; three years after Williams died in 1953, Mr. Bennett performed it in his honor at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.

Other trademark songs followed: “Rags to Riches” in 1953; “Stranger in Paradise,” from the Broadway show “Kismet,” also in 1953; Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s “Just in Time,” from the show “Bells Are Ringing,” in 1956. That same year, Mr. Bennett was host of his own television variety show, a summer replacement for a similar show that starred another popular Italian American crooner, Perry Como. In 1958, he recorded two albums with the Count Basie band, introducing him to the jazz audience.

In the 1950s, Mr. Bennett toured for the first time, played Las Vegas for the first time and got married for the first time, to Patricia Beech, a fan who had seen him perform in Cleveland. The marriage would flounder in the 1960s, overwhelmed by Mr. Bennett’s perpetual touring, but their two sons would end up playing roles in Mr. Bennett’s career: the older one, D’Andrea, known as Danny, became his father’s manager, and Daegal, known as Dae, became a music producer and recording engineer.

In July 1961, Mr. Bennett was performing in Hot Springs, Ark., and about to head to the West Coast when Ralph Sharon, his longtime pianist, played him a song written by George Cory and Douglass Cross that had been moldering in a drawer for two years. Mr. Sharon and Mr. Bennett decided that it would be perfect for their next date, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, and it was.

They recorded the song — of course it was “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” — six months later, in January 1962. It won Mr. Bennett his first two Grammys, for best male solo performance and record of the year, and worldwide fame. In “The Good Life,” he wrote that he was often asked if he ever tired of singing it.

“I answer, ‘Do you ever get tired of making love?’” he wrote.

Just five months later, Mr. Bennett performed at Carnegie Hall with Mr. Sharon and a small orchestra. He got sensational reviews — though The Times’s was measured — and the recording of the concert is now considered a classic.

But as the 1960s proceeded and rock ’n’ roll became dominant, Mr. Bennett’s popularity began to slip. In 1969, he succumbed to the pressure of the new president of Columbia Records, Clive Davis, to record his versions of contemporary songs, and the result, “Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today!” — including the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and “Something” — was a musical calamity, a record that Mr. Bennett would later tell an interviewer made him vomit.

His relationship with Columbia soured further and finally ended, and by the middle of the 1970s Mr. Bennett had formed his own company, Improv Records, on which he recorded the first of two of his most critically admired albums, duets with the jazz pianist Bill Evans. (The second one was released on Evans’s label, Fantasy.) Together the two opened the Newport Jazz Festival, which had moved to New York, at Carnegie Hall in 1976.

Improv went out of business in 1977, and without a recording contract Mr. Bennett relied more and more on Las Vegas, then in decline, for regular work. His mother died that year, and the profligate life he had been living in Beverly Hills caught up with him; the Internal Revenue Service was threatening to take his house. His second marriage, a tumultuous one to the actress Sandra Grant, collapsed — she would later say that she would have been better off if she had married her previous boyfriend, Joe DiMaggio — and he had begun using marijuana and cocaine heavily.

One day in 1979, high and in a panic, he took a bath to calm down and nearly died in the tub. In later years he would play down the seriousness of the event, but he wrote about it in “The Good Life,” describing what he called a near-death experience: “A golden light enveloped me in a warm glow. It was quite peaceful; in fact, I had the sense that I was about to embark on a very compelling journey. But suddenly I was jolted out of the vision. The tub was overflowing and Sandra was standing above me. She’d heard the water running for too long, and when she came in I wasn’t breathing. She pounded on my chest and literally brought me back to life.”

Mr. Bennett turned to his older son for help. Danny Bennett took over the management of his career, aiming to have the American musical standards that were his strength, and his handling of them, perceived as hip by a new generation.

Somewhat surprisingly, the strategy took hold. An article in Spin magazine, which was founded in 1985, declared Mr. Bennett and James Brown as the two foremost influences on rock ’n’ roll, and the magazine followed up with a long, admiring profile.

A Career Revival

Encouraged by executive changes at Columbia Records, Mr. Bennett returned to the Columbia fold in 1985. The next year he released the album “The Art of Excellence.” WBCN in Boston became the first rock station to give it regular airplay. Released in the emerging CD format, it spurred the sales of Mr. Bennett’s back catalog as music fans began replacing their vinyl records with CDs.

In 1993, Mr. Bennett was a presenter, along with two members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, at MTV’s Video Music Awards. The next year he gave an hourlong performance for MTV’s “Unplugged” series, which included duets with K.D. Lang (with whom he would later tour) and Elvis Costello. The recording of the show won the Grammy for album of the year.

The revival of Mr. Bennett’s career was complete. Not only had he returned to the kind of popularity he had enjoyed 40 years earlier, but he had also been accepted by an entirely new audience.

He recorded albums that honored musicians he admired — Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday — and he collaborated on standards with singers half, or less than half, his age. On the 2006 album “Duets: An American Classic,” he sang “If I Ruled the World” with Ms. Dion, “Smile” with Barbra Streisand and “For Once in My Life” with Stevie Wonder, and revisited his first Columbia single, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” with Sting. Five years later, on “Duets II,” his collaborators included Aretha Franklin, Queen Latifah, Willie Nelson and Ms. Winehouse.

As the century changed, he was once again touring, giving up to 200 performances a year, and recording prolifically.

In 2007 Mr. Bennett married a third time, to his longtime companion, Susan Crow, a teacher four decades his junior whom he had met in the late 1980s. Together they started a foundation, Exploring the Arts, that supports arts education in schools, and financed the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a public high school in Queens.

Mr. Bennett had lived in the same Manhattan apartment, where he died, for most of his adult life, except for a few years in Los Angeles and London, Ms. Weiner, his publicist, said. He is survived by his wife; his sons, Danny and Dae; his daughters, Johanna and Antonia Bennett; and 9 grandchildren.

If there was a magical quality to Mr. Bennett’s life, as suggested by David Evanier in a glowing 2011 biography, “All the Things You Are: The Life of Tony Bennett,” it is encapsulated by a story Mr. Bennett told to Whitney Balliett in 1974.

“I like the funny things in life that could only happen to me now,” he said. “Once, when I was singing Kurt Weill’s ‘Lost in the Stars’ in the Hollywood Bowl with Basie’s band and Buddy Rich on drums, a shooting star went falling through the sky right over my head and everyone was talking about it, and the next morning the phone rang and it was Ray Charles, who I’d never met, calling from New York. He said, ‘Hey, Tony, how’d you do that, man?’ and hung up.”

#Anthony Dominick Benedetto #Tony Bennett #New York Times #Obituary

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savage-kult-of-gorthaur · 2 years ago

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"MORE TEXTURES AND BOMBAST THAN ACTUAL HARD ROCK, "BDB" IN RETROSPECT IS A STRANGE COLLECTION OF HIGHLY POLISHED PERFORMANCES."

PIC(S) INFO: Relaeased 50 years ago earlier this year -- Spotlight on the "Billion Dollar Babies" LP, the sixth studio album by American rock band ALICE COOPER, and released in March 1973 under the Warner Bros. label. The album became the best selling ALICE COOPER record at the time of its release, hit number one on the album charts in both the US and the UK, and went on to be certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America.

RECORD OVERVIEW: "If first impressions are key, then the look alone of the "Billion Dollar Babies" LP made it an instant classic. A prime artifact from the days when the music business spent lavishly on complicated and expensive album art, the package was designed like a wallet. Outside was a large gold coin with a baby's head encircled by embossed diamonds against a bright-green snakeskin-patterned background. Inside were pop-out trading cards and an oversized billion-dollar bill picturing the band. The inner sleeve has lyrics on one side and the band, dressed in white, looking hilariously perplexed by their surroundings, petting white rabbits among stacks of paper money while Cooper holds an infant whose eyes are ringed by the same black makeup design he wore onstage.

After the long, wearying struggle to succeed followed by endless touring and boundless adulation, Alice Cooper the band was both peaking and coming apart in 1973. Having recently released "Killer" (1971) with its singles "Be My Lover" and "Under My Wheels," and a follow-up, "School's Out" (1972), whose LP came packaged in a pair of women's panties, conditions were ripe for these early progenitors of shock, schlock, and glam rock to fashion one lasting achievement yet to be.

Guitarists Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce (who also plays keyboards), drummer Neal Smith, bassist Dennis Dunaway, and Vince Furnier (a.k.a. Alice Cooper) recorded BDB from August 1972 through January 1973 at the Cooper Mansion in Connecticut with a mobile recording unit, as well as in Morgan Studios, London, and The Record Plant in New York City. The engineers were Shelly Yakus, Frank Hubach, Robin Black, Peter Flanagan, Jack Douglas, and Ed Sprigg. Guitarists Mick Mashbir, Dick Wagner, and Steve Hunter (the latter two would be prominent in Alice Cooper's solo career) and keyboardist Bob Dolin provided extra support.

More textures and bombast than actual hard rock, BDB in retrospect is a strange collection of highly polished performances. Upon closer listen, piano parts are a subtle but surprisingly essential part of the arrangements. Never loud or overdriven guitars, sometimes keening, aid in the album's high-camp zeitgeist."

-- STEREOPHILE, "ReDiscoveries #5: Alice Cooper's "Billion Dollar Babies," by Robert Baird, published May 30, 2023

Sources: www.stereophile.com/content/rediscoveries-5-alice-coopers-billion-dollar-babies, Pinterest, Classic Bands, Wikipedia, various, etc...

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bobbie-robron · 2 years ago

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My heart and head will always be with Ryan as Robert simply because he took on a role that had two other actors who played it, one since he was only a few years old and the other for most of the teen years, and made it his own, an embodiment of them and himself. Especially that first year (before the Who Shot Robert story), Ryan played on a lot of what Karl brought to the role (continuing to watch his story on classic ED) with his snark, smugness and expressions as well as bringing his own charm and take including a vulnerability that was not there with Karl!Robert when he took over.

Moving forward and toward the end, we saw a Robert that could have been if Christopher!Robert still had someone who saw and got him (e.g., Sarah) through his teen years forward. Aaron was the wild card that made it possible to unearth that part of him that he kept hidden all that time. In the end, each have their place in the Robert story but it would Ryan, Christopher (his naivety, innocence and love for his gran) and lastly Karl.

I know it’s going to look like the most idiotic question you ever had but between Karl Davies and Ryan Hawley, which one was the better Robert ? The answer might be clear to a lot but I saw many people saying Ryan had the best storyline (Robron) which made him unforgettable but Karl embodied the character better and that also he is the better actor.

there is only one Robert for me

I didn't watch emmerdale when Karl was on and I've only seen him in little clips and some gifs so I can't really comment on 'his' Robert. I saw him in an episode of Call The Midwife though and he's a pretty decent actor... but he's no Ryan

#robron #the actors of robert #it’ll always be ryan

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tilbageidanmark · 3 years ago

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Movies I watched this week - 39

I spent over 50 (!) hours on the sofa this week, (enjoying myself 85% of the time)...

Sløborn, an ominous Danish-German TV pandemic series, very much like Soderbergh’s ‘Contagion’ and in ‘Black Mirror’ style. Normal life of a small island community between Denmark and Germany breaks down and completely collapses when it is hit by a lethal bird flue like virus.

It was extremely prescient, as it was shot in 2019, before Covid! Conceived as Si-fi, it looks today like TV, because the series was able to capture everything that happened around the world after January 2020 in accurate details.

With Roland Møller (of ‘Riders of Justice’). 7+/10

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My introduction to “The grandmother of The French New Wave”, Agnès Varda (Hard to believe that I never saw her films before!):

✳️✳️✳️ “Inspiration, Creation and Sharing...” Varda by Agnès, my first Varda is her last 2019 auto-biography, in which, at 90, she shared footage and stories from her life and work. The first sample clip (of meeting her Uncle Yanco in Sausalito) won me over, and the rest convinced me to catch up on everything I’ve missed through the years. What a wonderful artist!

✳️✳️✳️ Cléo from 5 to 7. A feminine film about female identity - a new favorite! A beautiful singer must wait 2 hours for the results of her cancer tests. With a magnifique mid-film scene (at 0;38) of the heartbreaking chanson 'Sans Toi', marking the beginning of her quiet transformation.

✳️✳️✳️ Vagabond, a story of a lonely, young woman, an unapologetic drifter, unglamorous, aimless, independent, desperately lost. Dark and nonjudgmental exploration of the refusal to conform to anything. 8+/10.

✳️✳️✳️ (For Sammy - Per our conversation). The Gleaners and I, "The eighth best documentary film of all time”, per ‘Sight & Sound poll. Derived from the famous painting by Millet. Simply wonderful!

✳️✳️✳️ One Hundred And One Nights, 100 year old Michel Piccoli “Monsieur Simon Cinema”, hires a young girl to reminisce with about the history of cinema. An unsuccessful Meta-film that nevertheless is a love letter for cinephiles. Populated by 3 dozens of Who’s Who of French (and World) stars, playacting in this symbolic, Fellinisque fable that draws upon the classics. Mastroianni, Depardieu, Belmondo, Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Anouk Aimée, Fanny Ardant, Gina Lollobrigida, Jane Birkin, etc, etc..

(Photo Above).

✳️✳️✳️ The Young Girls of Rochefort, the wonderful, colorful, sentimental musical by Varda’s husband Jacques Demy, with the most beautiful woman in the world and her sister. Romantic eye candy set to music by Michel Legrand. A year later Deneuve would do Belle de Jour, and Françoise Dorléac would die in a car accident, 8+/10

✳️✳️✳️ Even better, The Young Girls Turn 25, Varda’s 1993 behind the scenes documentary and return to small town Rocheford, to show how it changed the town and left an impression. 9/10

“...The memory of happiness is perhaps also happiness...”

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The other Jacques Demy modern opera The Umbrellas of Cherbourg knocked me over all over again. Catherine Deneuve’s angelic beauty in this film made me cry for the duration like a baby. And not only at the train station when they say goodbye forever.

10/10

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Night moves, a tense thriller by Kelly Reichardt, about three radical environmentalists who blow up an Oregon dam. Slow and tense, and like her ‘First Cow’, watching it filled me with constant, low-level anxiety. The off-screen sabotage is placed at the exact mid-point of the movie: The first half is the preparation for it, and the second half shows the aftermath of the act. 7+/10

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2 unexpected Small Town gems by Miguel Arteta:

✳️✳️✳️ The good Girl, an odd and surprising mismatched romance between 30 year old Jennifer Aniston and Jake Gyllenhaal (22) as employees of a Texas big-box store that is always empty. Her voice-over reminded me of True Romance’s Alabama Whitman. 7/10

✳️✳️✳️ Ed Helms, a sheltered insurance salesman from the backwaters of Wisconsin, goes to an convention in the big city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The nearly conventional story arc has some genuinely heartfelt funny moments. With Maeby Fünke, as Bree the prostitute and Sigourney Weaver as the ex-teacher he balls. Also a surprising drug party, where he smoke crack cocaine and loves it. 5+/10

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Same theme of people prostituting their own ‘morals’, the notoriously-prudish 1993 Indecent Proposal didn’t age too well. “Billionaire”-porn that asks the question ‘How much would you pay for one night with Robert Redford?’ Gratuitous semi-naked Demi Moore included.

Related: “Stop hitting the button!”

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Wildland (Kød & blod = Flesh and blood), an uncomfortable and claustrophobic Danish gangster thriller about a 17 year old girl who moves in with the criminal family of Sidse Babett Knudsen, her estranged aunt. 6+/10

“For some people, things go wrong before they even begin”

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Jim Jarmusch‘s Broken Flowers, a touching road film with Bill Murray, as an old ‘Don Juan’ who receive a pink, unsigned letter from an old lover, letting him know that he has a 20 year old son he never knew about.

Loveliest film of the week.

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The 2 films directed by Tom Ford:

✳️✳️✳️ A single Man, a sad and lonely gay professor, closeted in 1962 Los Angeles, is preparing to kill himself with a gun, after his boyfriend / love of his life had died in a car accident. Mute and haunting aesthetics in the fashion designer’s debut film, based on a Christopher Isherwood novel.

The ‘Stormy Weather’ dance scene between Charley and George. 8/10

✳️✳️✳️ Nocturnal Animals: Amy Adams is an unhappy owner of a fancy art gallery who receives a disturbing book manuscript written by her ex-husband, which symbolizes their relationship 20 years prior. Rarefied visuals and distinctive style.

Starts with an astonishing scene of obese old ladies dancing naked at Amy’s gala event. Michael Shannon rules as a dying Texas detective! 6+/10.

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Jean Vigo’s 1933 classic Zero for Conduct was so blatantly anarchistic, it was immediately banned in France until after WW2. In silent film style, it tells about a group of mischievous kids who rebel against the authorities of their old-fashioned boarding school. Part-inspiration for Truffaut's 400 Blows.

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Anatomy of a murder, Otto Preminger’s 1960 courtroom drama, with opening credits by Saul Bass. Crisp black & white cinematography, and with rape victim Lee Remick playing it as an outgoing loose girl of ambiguous morals, a modern floozy. 7/10.

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Blush, a wondrous, spectacularly-animated, wordless short by Joe Mateo. What starts as a riff on ‘The Little Prince’, ends up like the opening montage from ‘Up’. The obvious realization that this is a personal metaphor makes the story even deeper.

I watched it twice back to back. 10/10

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If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast - 95 year old Carl Reiner asks a bunch of charming nonagenarian friends how they manage to live so well for so long. Their answers may (not) shock you...

Spry Dick Van Dyke (92) and half-his-age wife end the film with a lovely rendition of “Young at heart”

✴️

Hi-school-level adaptation of Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the 21st Century. A breezy discussion of how slave economy and colonialist military repression 300 years ago turn into extreme capitalism of inequality & tax-avoidance today. America is now similar economically to what England was in the early 1800s. A tiny percentage of society controls almost all its wealth. (Full text of the book here).

✴️

Ride the eagle, a flat new indie about a guy whose estranged hippy mother leaves him her cabin at the lake when she dies, but only if he complete a certain list of tasks. Could be so much better, but the actor playing the guy was just so terrible. Unlike JK Simmons who had a small role. Best detail, when he discovers that all the cabinets in the house are full with pot.

✴️

Old, my first, (and possibly last), M. Night Shyamalan. The seductive premise of a secluded beach at a fancy tropical resort that ages everybody who comes there, turns into an unconvincing Twilight Zone bore.

...”(Gurgling sounds)”...

✴️

First watch: I never saw (any) Planet of the apes before, and in spite of my misgivings, gave it a go. 100% anthropomorphic, it couldn’t visualize a universe different from the American mindset of that period. Preachy and very Rod Sterling-like. "It's a madhouse in here”. Pass!

✴️

The latest Veritasium YouTube video about bowling current technology. Always interesting.

- - - - -

Throw-back to the art project:

Planet of the Apes Adora.

- - - - -

(My complete movie list is here)

#movies

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stevepotterwrites · 4 years ago

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Maybe you’ve had the same experience, you go looking for a book you are sure someone must have written only to find that no such book exists. No one has written it yet. A few years ago, I wanted to learn more about the interconnections between the early days of punk rock and the poetry scene in New York City in the Seventies. This, in part, grew out of research for a project. I was searching for information to help establish a backstory timeline for the poet-professor parents of the protagonist of my novel-in-progress Gangs With Greek Names. I was also just curious. I wanted to learn more about the era of my high school years, learn more about what was going on in the big city twenty miles west of the Long Island burb where I grew up. I knew Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, and Jim Carroll were all involved in the scene centered around the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery in their pre-rock ’n’ roll fame days. I wondered how much overlap there was between that scene and the nascent punk scene centered around CBGB. Proto-punks Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs and Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground also had roots in poetry. Surely someone must have explored those connections and written a book about it. I imagined something along the lines of David Hajdu’s Positively 4th Street for the punk generation. Daniel Kane’s “Do You Have a Band?” Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City is the book I was looking for back then. I’m glad someone’s written it. Too late to help with my novel’s backstory timeline (cobbled together instead from other sources) but a pleasure to read just the same. Kane explores the influence New York School poetry had on punk rock and the influence punk rock had on some second-generation New York School poets. Admirably, Kane never strives to clarify distinctions and divisions between one scene or tendency and another to the point of distortion. He helps us see as clearly as possible through the muddy waters without ever pretending they aren’t muddy. So much of any scene is an ongoing act of self-creation among its participants which is weakened once a marketable name is pasted over it. One could argue that punk died the day it was labeled punk. Post-punk was born and lasted until it was labeled “post-punk,” I guess. True sailing is dead! Kane lays out the premise of the book in his introduction after acknowledging the more widely-known influence of the Beats and earlier figures such as Rimbaud on rock and roll:

“Do You Have a Band? Does not deny that there are resonances between the band Television and French symbolism, the rhetoric of punk rock and Situationist International slogans. But what about the work of poets who actually shared New York City’s Lower East Side streets, mimeographed pages, and stages with the pioneering figures of punk? How did downtown writing and poetics of the 1960s and 1970s make their way into rockers’ music and approach to art? Musicians in bands from Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg’s Fugs through the Jim Carroll Band were as influenced by and productively critical of the writers living all around them as they were by and of authors from the distant and not-so-distant past.”

Each chapter focuses on a key figure or figures in the overlapping terrain between proto-punk or punk and the poetry scene – Ed Sanders and the Fugs, Lou Reed, Richard Hell, Patti Smith, John Giorno, Eileen Myles, Dennis Cooper — with cameo appearances from the likes of Kathy Acker, John Ashberry, Ted Berrigan, CBGB owner Hilly Kristal, Lydia Lunch, Robert Mapplethorpe (whose question to Eileen Myles provides the book’s title), Bernadette Mayer, Thurston Moore, Alice Notley, Frank O’Hara, Anne Waldman, Andy Warhol and many others. The afterward focuses on what may be the most direct link between (second generation) New York School poetry and punk rock, Jim Carroll’s classic anthem “People Who Died,” inspired by his friend Ted Berrigan’s poem of the same name. There are quite a lot of funny moments illustrating the interpersonal tensions and aggravations present on any creative scene. Andy Warhol asks John Giorno, “oh, John, why does it have to be so boring,” at a poetry reading by Frank O’Hara and others in a crowded gallery. There was no microphone and half the audience couldn’t hear a word of it. Eileen Myles tells about a chaotic poetry reading she and friends gave in a laundromat. Richard Hell confesses the shameful truth – he was a Dylan Thomas fan – and then goes on to compare Thomas’ poetry to a Led Zeppelin arena show. Me, I love Dylan Thomas, unapologetically. But then I wish I’d gotten the chance to see a Led Zeppelin arena show too, so… Anyhow, I don’t have to choose between him and Frank O’Hara and neither do you, dear reader. I don’t care what anybody says. Resist the false binary wherever you find it. It was interesting to get a better sense of the dynamic between another Dylan Thomas fan, Patti Smith, and poet Anne Waldman, who was at the center of the St. Marks scene at the time. I’d wondered about that occasionally, if they got along, how they got along. That seemed like ripe territory for a diva battle of epic proportions, so it was interesting to read about Smith’s letter to Waldman describing what she liked and did not like about the Poetry Project. In a sense, Do You Have a Band? may be seen as the third volume in a trilogy following Kane’s previous informative books All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s and What Is Poetry: Conversations With the American Avante-Garde. Recommended reading for anyone interested in learning more about the various interconnections between poets, musicians, and artists in New York in the sixties and seventies.

https://bookshop.org/a/8227/9780231162975

https://bookfreak.us/2018/04/05/punk-poets-and-poet-punks-a-review-of-daniel-kanes-do-you-have-a-band/

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cicelythereaper · 4 years ago

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Hello! I was wondering if you had anything on Y Gododdin 😃

hey! fellow gododdin enthusiast! what a delight

i presume this is a request for reading recommendations - i don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, or how accessible these will be, but i’ve tried to cover most bases here. i WISH there were more literary criticism, maybe there is in the welsh-language scholarship and i just haven’t found it?

it’s entirely possible that i will have missed some obvious things here, i’m mostly sticking to stuff that i personally have read. if something mind-blowing has come out since the last time i did gododdin reading then it’s not here, i’m afraid!

but enough disclaimers. on to the recs!

text and translation:

for a translation, i cannot recommend enough joseph p. clancy’s translation as found in the triumph tree: scotland’s earliest poetry, 550-1350, ed. t. o. clancy (1998). this is fantastic. it’s poetic, it’s a joy to read, and having used it as part of a deep read last year where i went through the welsh text in detail i am honestly AMAZED regularly at how well clancy handles the many translation issues that arise. it’s loose, and it doesn’t translate every single stanza unfortunately, but for the spirit of the poem you really can’t do better

that said, if you need another translation to check against/to fill in the gaps, i’d recommend kenneth jackson’s the gododdin: the oldest scottish poem (1969). it’s a prose translation, so it’s harder to use in conjunction with the text, but it’s pretty clear and accurate

text-wise... things get complicated. honestly, the best edition is probably still ifor williams’ canu aneirin (1938), in terms of faithfulness to the words on the manuscript page. (i also really enjoy his textual commentary, but it is in modern welsh so not accessible to everyone.) the major problem with it is that you are not going to get the stanzas in the order they appear in the manuscript - he reorders them into groups of perceived variants. this also makes it harder to distinguish between the A-text and the B-text. AND it means that the stanzas are not in the same order as in any of the translations!

if you can get hold of it, i really really think it is worth having daniel huws’ llyfr aneirin: a facsimile (1989). the introduction is SO useful for understanding the manuscript context, and it comes with gwenogvryn evans’ transcription of the book of aneirin, which you can compare with williams’ edition if need be to work out where a stanza actually goes.

there’s a conspectus of editions which i think thomas owen clancy put together but i cannot for the LIFE of me remember where it is - if you think you’ll need it, PM me and i’ll see what i can do

dating, textual criticism and historicity:

t. m. charles-edwards, wales and the britons, 350-1064 (2013), chapter 11 - this is from more of a historical perspective than a strictly linguistic/palaeographical/dating perspective, but it’s a really good general introduction and i definitely recommend starting with it. if you read nothing else, read this. this whole book is a godsend

t. m. charles-edwards, 'the authenticity of the gododdin: an historian's view', in astudiaethau ar yr hengerdd, eds. bromwich and jones (1978), pp. 44-91 - this kind of lays out the standard view which everyone has been deconstructing ever since. we don’t know anything about what’s going on with y gododdin, but at one point we thought we did know something and this was what it looked like

d. n. dumville, 'early welsh poetry: problems of historicity', in early welsh poetry: studies in the book of aneirin, ed. b. f. roberts (1988) - and HERE is the deconstruction! a pretty good overview of the issues with “knowing anything” when it comes to y gododdin

p. sims-williams, 'dating the poems of aneirin and taliesin', zeitschrift für celtische philologie 36 (2016), 163-224 - i don’t have any notes on this and haven’t read it recently, but i remember it being good (it’s sims-williams so of course it is). almost certainly contains linguistics, but is probably also written readably

o. j. padel, 'aneirin and taliesin: sceptical speculations', in beyond the gododdin: dark age scotland in medieval wales, ed. a. woolf (2013), pp. 153-75 - if you can stand linguistics talk, padel does his best to make it understandable here and gives a good overview of the linguistic arguments for and against suggested dates for y gododdin. this whole book is actually very useful

g. r. isaac, 'canu aneirin awdl LI', journal of celtic linguistics 2 (1993), 65-91, AND 'readings in the history and transmission of the gododdin', cambrian medieval celtic studies 37 (1999), 55-78 - DEEP IN THE TEXTUAL CRITICISM. honestly, my poor attention span means i find it hard to pay attention all the way through these two, but if you want a really in-depth look at the possible relationships between the A and B-texts of y gododdin, this is the way to go

historical discussion and background:

charles-edwards in wales and the britons chapter 11 again

j. rowland, 'warfare and horses in the gododdin and the problem of catraeth', cambrian medieval celtic studies 30 (1995), 13-40 - this is a pretty cool look at the role of cavalry in y gododdin and while i don’t agree with all of it, i think it’s really useful reading if you’re going for a historical take on the poem

p. m. dunshea, 'the meaning of catraeth: a revised early context for y gododdin', in beyond the gododdin again, pp. 81-114 - makes some ESSENTIAL points re the question of: is catraeth catterick? moreover, IS CATRAETH A PLACE?

c. cessford, 'northern england and the gododdin poem', northern history 33 (1997), 218-22 - a historical perspective on the poem with some very useful points, comparing the situation as sketched out in y gododdin with what we know of the area at the time

m. wood, 'bernician transitions: place-names and archaeology', in early medieval northumbria: kingdoms and communities, AD 450-1100, eds. petts and turner (2011), pp. 35-70 - a welcome look at the archaeological and place-name evidence for what was going on in bernicia as it changed from a brittonic to a germanic-dominated area. really useful to have in mind both when reading the poem and when reading more literary history

r. collins, 'military communities and transformation of the frontier from the fourth to the sixth centuries', in the same book, pp. 15-34 - pretty fascinating look at the earlier background running up to the time period depicted in y gododdin, and the possibility of continuity between the roman occupation of hadrian’s wall and the post-roman era there. useful social/archaeological perspective!

f. h. clark, 'thinking about western northumbria', in the same book, pp. 113-28 - an early medieval english perspective on the area at the time, useful for comparison and completeness’ sake

literary discussion:

ifor williams, lectures on early welsh poetry (1944) and the beginnings of welsh poetry, ed. bromwich (1972, 2nd ed. 1980) - THE CLASSICS. an old-fashioned, not to say outdated, viewpoint, but that’s because this is the guy who INVENTED the viewpoint back when it was new! even now there’s a lot of good stuff packed into these and ifor williams’ prose style is a real pleasure to read. not to be missed

a. o. h. jarman, 'the heroic ideal in early welsh poetry', in beiträge zur indogermanistik und keltologie, ed. meid (1967), pp. 193-211 - likewise somewhat old-fashioned now, but lays out the classic viewpoint well and makes some good literary points. it may also be worth reading the introduction to his edition/translation, aneirin: the gododdin (1988). (i don’t recommend using it as an edition because he conflates the A and B texts and renders the text into modern welsh - this means it reads very smoothly but is quite a bit further away from what’s on the manuscript page.)

h. fulton, 'cultural heroism in the old north of britain: the evidence of aneirin's gododdin', in the epic in history ed. davidson, mukherjee and zlatar (1994), pp. 18-39 - a pretty interesting read, about the mindset expressed in the poetry, its purpose and its construction

this isn’t lit crit but i’m putting in my favourite g. r. isaac quote from his article ‘gweith gwen ystrat and the northern heroic age of the sixth century’, p. 69: ‘Koch writes that the Book of Aneirin’s ‘immediate milieu is… not the Celtic Heroic Age, but the High Middle Ages’, as if the ‘Celtic Heroic Age’ were a period of comparable historical status to the High Middle Ages. This is not the case, however. A ‘heroic age’ cannot be the ‘immediate milieu’ of any literary production, a ‘heroic age’ cannot produce literature, because a ‘heroic age’ is itself produced through literature (taken in the broadest sense). It is a literary product. The Homeric epics are not the product of a Bronze Age Achaean heroic age, but vice versa. The Irish Ulster Cycle is not the product of an Iron Age, pre-Christian heroic age, but vice versa. And the medieval Welsh poems of ‘Aneirin’ and ‘Taliesin’ (and Triads, sections of the Historia Brittonum, and much else) are not products of a sixth-century North British heroic age, but vice versa.’

honestly there just is not nearly enough lit crit for y gododdin, in english at least, especially to explain cool shit that the welsh text is doing that isn’t visible in the translation, and/or things that could be subversive or ambiguous about it - so, i don’t know what your level of engagement with the medieval welsh text is, but if you’re curious, if you want to know more about what’s going on in a specific stanza (or which stanzas are extended puns), or just which things i’ve been dying to yell about all year, PLEASE message me and I! WILL! YELL!

articles which are almost certainly good and useful but it’s been too long since i’ve read them to say:

t. o. clancy, 'the kingdoms of the north: poetry, places, politics', in beyond the gododdin again, pp. 153-75

m. haycock, 'early welsh poets look north', likewise in beyond the gododdin, pp. 115-52

FINAL NOTE:

one of the problems with translations is that they give an impression of way more certainty about the meaning of the text... than is actually there. you’re pretty safe with clancy or kenneth jackson, but tread carefully. again, i don’t know your level of engagement with medieval welsh, but if you want to know if there are any major textual issues with a stanza, hmu and i will gladly consult my copious textual notes! but in general, BEWARE of basing anything too heavily on the following groups of stanzas:

A40, A41, B5, B6 (Am drynni drylaw drylenn; Clancy ‘For the feast, most sad, disastrous’)

A42, B25, B35 (Eur ar vur caer; Clancy ‘Gold on fortress wall’)

A48, B3, B24 (Llech leutu tud leudvre; Clancy ‘Standing stone in cleared ground’)

A62, B14, B15, B16, B36 (Angor dewr daen; Clancy ‘Anchor, Deifr-router’)

the Gorchanau if you’re interacting with those, especially the Gwarchan Maeldderw - if anyone tells you they know exactly what is going on in these, do not believe them. isaac has a full translation of the gwarchan maeldderw in cambrian medieval studies 44, and it’s useful, but i’m not by ANY means completely convinced by it, so tread carefully.

the more stanzas there are in a group of variants (or at least a group that shares lines), the more likely it is that those stanzas are going to be SUPER DUPER TEXTUALLY FUCKED UP, is a pretty good rule of thumb.

#y gododdin #cicely speaks #academic book recs #asnc things #I AM SO DEEP IN THE QUESTIONABLE ETYMOLOGIES AND SADNESS ABOUT DEAD YOUNG MEN #i have PAINFULLY detailed textual notes on this whole fuckin thing #behold my continuing love affair with ifor williams' prose in welsh and english #ANYWAY #hmu for GODODDIN YELLING #it may be yelling of sadness about dead dudes! it may be yelling of frustration about FUCKING SCRIBES!#who can say!#violetcancerian

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supes9 · 4 years ago

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2020 Creator Wrap: Favorite Works

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 (or so) favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought into the world in 2020. Tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works.

I was tagged by darling @mymycorrhizae. Thank you, Farah, love you, and this will be fun to do! 😁💕

So, I don’t think I made as much this year as I have in past years (as I wasn’t on Tumblr as often in 2020), but I was surprised to scroll through my blog and discover there were more items than I realized. I’m gonna go ahead and pick a variety (although there will be an overlapping theme or two for a few of them) of favorites...

1. Nygmobblepot “Try” Gifset: I feel like this was from 2019, but Tumblr says otherwise, so I guess it was just one of my most earliest posts of 2020. ; ) This is a favorite because Rick Astley’s song, “Try,” was the inspiration behind it, and I had fun choosing Ed and Oswald scenes and using different fonts and colors to complement the lyrics. Plus, I’m pretty sure I’ll have a never-ending love for Nygmobblepot. 💚💜

2. Reed900 “Electricity” Video: This one is super special because I made this video for Farah (mymycorrhizae), after she inadvertently introduced me to the wonderful fan-made film, Detroit Evolution, and the beautiful couple that is Reed900! I had so much fun watching the movie with her and had a huge soft spot for Nines and Gavin afterwards. I was compelled to make a video revolving around their relationship in the film, with the intention of surprising and dedicating the video to lovely Farah. It was also great to edit a video again that was not work-related and just a complete joy and fun to make! ☺️

3. The Greatest American Hero/Bill Maxwell “Synchronize our watches” Gifset: This one was well and truly just made for myself to enjoy and I have one whopping note on the post to prove it, lol! It’s from an ‘80s superhero show that I have happy memories of watching on DVD years back with my brother. The show is both ridiculous and wonderful, and I had been rewatching some episodes on YouTube earlier in the year. The scene here with one of the main characters, Bill Maxwell (played by Robert Culp), just makes me laugh every time I see or think about it. The lines and Culp’s delivery of them are superb. 😜

4. Nygmobblepot “Never Gonna Give You Up” Video: Also a very special one, I made this video for another dear friend, Raven (@ravenwald), as a birthday gift. After I found out she also enjoys the Rick Astley song, I really wanted to use it for her birthday Nygmobblepot video, but a little differently. I used an orchestral/instrumental version of the song, which led to a very dialogue-heavy video, mixing the music and Ed and Oswald’s words throughout it. It was a bit of a new challenge for me, and I was really happy with how it turned out. Most importantly, Raven was as well! 🥰

5. Rick Astley “Body & Soul” Gifset: Have you picked up on the main overlapping theme...? 😉 So, it became more apparent than ever in 2020 that I have a genuine, and rather strong adoration for Rick Astley. I love him both as a singer and a person, and with him being very active music-wise and through social media this past year, my love for him grew even more. When posted on his Twitter and Instagram that it was the anniversary of his one past album, “Body and Soul,” I wanted to make a gifset in celebration. It was his first more mature and soulful album in contrast to the ‘80s pop music he became famous for, and to me, one of his best. Again, this was just for the pure fun of creating it. And I really like how the black and white aesthetic for the album looked for the gifset. A classic look. 💜

* Also, since this did say “5 (or so)” favorites, I’m also going to add my recent video edit of Alex Albon. Watching F1 with my brother this past year has given me lots of happy moments, although just about every race consisted of being stressed for Alex. 😅 I am so sad this ray of sunshine of a driver will not be Max’s Red Bull teammate again for the 2021 season, but I’m enjoying making this video to highlight his talent and beautiful personality. There is only the smallest bit of it currently done and posted, so I just wanted to give it a mention rather than adding it to my initial five picks.

I shall tag some other great creators I follow, should they like to join in on this: @riverance, @samvaleska, @princesserica84, @bandicoot88 and @adorablealbono. ☺️💕

#didn't get this done before midnight but i'm not TOO far off lol!#this was a lot of fun to do #i enjoyed reminiscing on my posts for the year #thanks again for tagging me for this Farah!#love you!!#2020 favorite works

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myhauntedsalem · 5 years ago

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Horror Movies Based on True Events 2

Winchester (2018)

Helen Mirren stars in the movie as a firearm manufacturer’s widow who thinks she is being haunted by the ghosts of people who were killed by the rifles of her husband’s company. The mansion she lives in is based on a real place, known as the Winchester Mystery House, which the real-life woman who Mirren plays spent 38 years constructing and renovating as she lived there. Legend has it she was taking building direction from spirits, with a tour guide telling Vanity Fair that Ms. Winchester would have séances at night and then give new building plans to her foreman in the morning.

The Hills Have Eyes (1977 & 2006)

Wes Craven’s cult classic (and its remake) centers around a traveling family whose car breaks down, leaving them stranded and in the clutches of cannibals. The movie was inspired by Sawney Bean, a Scottish man who, according to legend, led his clan to kill and eat 1,000 people around the year 1600. A Scottish historian told The BBC in 2013 though that the legend was fiction, created by prejudiced Englishmen “as a dig at Scots.”

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)

Ed and Lorraine Warren strike again! The couple claimed that a Connecticut home rented by the Snedeker family in 1986 had been overtaken by demons, likely because the building was previously a mortuary. In the movie, a fictional Campbell family is tormented by supernatural beings.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)

The movie’s title character is a 19-year-old girl who dies following an exorcism, and the film focuses on the trial of the priest who performed it. It’s based on the real 1976 case of Anneliese Michel, a German woman who died at the age of 23 from starvation following 67 exorcisms to rid her of supposed demons.

The Amityville Horror (1979)

In the movie, a young couple buys a house in Amityville, New York, and it turns out to be haunted by supernatural evils. The real-life Lutz family moved to an Amityville home in 1975 about a year after Ronald DeFeo Jr. murdered six family members there. The Lutzes moved out after just 28 days, citing strange odors, sounds, gelatinous drops, and other terrifying phenomena.

Dahmer (2002)

Jeremy Renner starred as the notorious serial killer in this horror biopic that includes fictional versions of several of Dahmer’s victims. Dahmer, also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal, ultimately took the lives of 17 boys and men.

The Blob (1958)

The Blob was inspired by a 1950 incident involving a handful of Philadelphia police officers who witnessed a mysterious, gelatinous alien mass fall from the sky. It allegedly dissolved before long, and thankfully didn’t eat anyone.

Deranged (1974)

A deranged man becomes obsessed with corpses, eventually resorting to creating new ones. The film was subtitled “The Confessions of a Necrophile” in the US. Like so many other horror films of the era, Deranged killer Ezra Cobb was based on the murderer Ed Gein.

Jaws (1975)

An enormous shark terrorizes beachgoers off the coast of the fictional New England town of Amity Island. Jaws was inspired by the 1916 deaths in New Jersey of five victims at the teeth of one ferocious rogue shark.

Eaten Alive (1977)

The proprietor of a rural Texas hotel attacks victims and feed them to his pet crocodile. The events of Eaten Alive, which also went by the alternate titles Death Trap, Horror Hotel, and Starlight Slaughter, were based on the real life “alligator killer,” Joe Ball. Ball murdered at least two women in the 1930s, and rumor is he disposed of the bodies by feeding them to the pet alligators he kept at his Elmendorf, Texas bar.

Audrey Rose (1977)

In one of his earliest roles, Anthony Hopkins plays Elliot Hoover, who becomes convinced that a 10-year-old girl is the reincarnation of his dead daughter. Audrey Rose was adapted from a novel of the same title by Frank De Felitta, who was inspired to explore reincarnation in his writing after his 6-year-old son allegedly began spontaneously playing ragtime piano.

The Entity (1982)

A woman is attacked by a paranormal, invisible attacker. The Entity was adapted from the novel of the same name by Frank De Felitta (also the author of Audrey Rose). It was based on the story of a Culver City, Calif. woman who believed she was being raped by ghosts.

The Entity (1982)

The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)

An ethnobotanist–a scientist who studies how native cultures use plants for medicine and other purposes–investigates a drug that allegedly creates Voodoo zombies. It was based on the nonfiction book of the same name by real world ethnobotanist Wade Davis, who investigated the story of alleged zombie Clairvius Narcisse.

Child’s Play (1988)

A child’s doll is possessed by the soul of a serial killer. Chucky’s story was inspired by Robert, a haunted doll that allegedly talked and inspired fits of rage in its young owner. Robert is still on display in the Florida Key West Martello Museum.

Fire in the Sky (1993)

A group of men are investigated for murder after a friend was apparently abducted by aliens. In 1975 Travis Walton claimed to have been abducted by a UFO, although he was never able to prove it.

The Dentist (1996)

Amid various hallucinations, a sadistic dentist gets revenge on his cheating wife. It’s been speculated that The Dentist was based on the true story of Dr. Glennon Edward Engleman, a Missouri dentist who, over decades, convinced multiple women to marry other men, who he would then murder. They’d split the insurance checks.

Ravenous (1999)

A US soldier during the Mexican-American War is assigned to a remote mountain fort, where he encounters a stranger who turns out to be a murderous cannibal. Ravenous was inspired both by the Donner Party, the infamous group of pioneers who were forced to resort to cannibalism after becoming stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and by Alfred Packer, who apparently ate his companions on a gold-prospecting expedition when they became stranded in the Rockies.

From Hell (2001)

Scotland Yard investigates the murders committed by the infamous Jack the Ripper, uncovering conspiracies along the way. From Hell, based on a graphic novel by Alan Moore, speculates on the real murderer Jack the Ripper, who was never definitively identified.

Wolf Creek (2005)

Three backpackers are hunted by a madman through the Australian outback. Writer and director Greg McLean said Wolf Creek was based on three separate real life Australian serial killers: Ivan Milat, AKA The Backpacker Killer, who murdered backpackers in the ’90s; Bradley Murdoch, who allegedly tried to kidnap a woman after murdering her boyfriend; and the Snowtown Murders, a series of 11 grisly murders carried out by four men and one woman in the small town of Snowtown in South Australia.

Them (2006)

A couple are attacked in their home by a group of sadistic children and teenagers. Them is reportedly based on the story of an Austrian couple murdered at their home in the Czech Republic. That said, the details on those alleged real events are hard to come by, so take this one with a grain of salt.

#Horror Movies Based on True Events 2 #horror #horror movies #paranormal #ghost and hauntings #ghost and spirits

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moonlightmurder · 5 years ago

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Favorite True Crime Books – part 2

John Wayne Gacy: Defending a Monster by Sam L. Amirante : “Sam, could you do me a favor?” Thus begins a story that has now become part of America’s true crime hall of fame. It is a gory, grotesque tale befitting a Stephen King novel. It is also a David and Goliath saga—the story of a young lawyer fresh from the Public Defender’s Office whose first client in private practice turns out to be the worst serial killer in our nation’s history.

Sam Amirante had just opened his first law practice when he got a phone call from his friend John Wayne Gacy, a well-known and well-liked community figure. Gacy was upset about what he called “police harassment” and asked Amirante for help. With the police following his every move in connection with the disappearance of a local teenager, Gacy eventually gives a drunken, dramatic, early morning confession—to his new lawyer. Gacy is eventually charged with murder and Amirante suddenly becomes the defense attorney for one of American’s most disturbing serial killers. It is his first case. This is a gripping narrative that reenacts the gruesome killings and the famous trial that shocked a nation.

American Legal Injustice: Behind the Scenes with an Expert Witness by Emanuel Tanay : Forensic psychiatrist Emanuel Tanay has testified in thousands of court cases as an expert witness, including such notorious cases as those of Jack Ruby, Sam Sheppard, and Theodore ‘Ted’ Bundy. Tanay walks the reader through his experiences in the courtroom, explaining the role of the forensic psychiatrist in the litigation process and providing a ‘behind-the-scenes’ view of our criminal justice system, including individual chapters on some of his most interesting and infamous cases. Tanay also provides clear examples of the rampant injustice that he has witnessed and argues that the potential for injustice is built into our legal system in the form of incompetent lawyers, the imbalance of resources between the pricey defense lawyers hired by large corporations in civil trials and the inexperienced lawyers often hired by plaintiffs, and the political concerns of elected judges and prosecutors. American Legal Injustice: Behind the Scenes with an Expert Witness is a must-read for Law & Order, Court TV, and true crime enthusiasts.

The Last Victim: A True-Life Journey into the Mind of the Serial Killer by Jason Moss : It started with a college course assignment, then escalated into a dangerous obsession. Eighteen-year-old honor student Jason Moss wrote to men whose body counts had made criminal history: men named Dahmer, Manson, Ramirez, and Gacy.

Posing as their ideal victim, Jason seduced them with his words. One by one they wrote him back, showering him with their madness and violent fantasies. Then the game spun out of control. John Wayne Gacy revealed all to Jason — and invited his pen pal to visit him in prison…

It was an offer Jason couldn’t turn down. Even if it made him…

The book that has riveted the attention of the national media, this may be the most revealing look at serial killers ever recorded and the most illuminating study of the dark places of the human mind ever attempted.

The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror by James Presley : Set in the rowdy, often lawless town of Texarkana shortly after WWII, The Phantom Killer is the history of the most puzzling unsolved cases in the United States.

The salacious and scandalous murders of a series of couples on Texarkana’s “lovers lanes” in seemingly idyllic post-WWII America created a media maelstrom and cast a pall of fear over an entire region. What is even more surprising is that the case has remained cold for decades. Combining archival research and investigative journalism, Pulitzer Prize nominated historian James Presley reveals evidence that provides crucial keys to unlocking this decades-old puzzle.

Dubbed “the Phantom murders” by the press, these grisly crimes took place in an America before dial telephones, DNA science, and criminal profiling. Even pre-television, print and radio media stirred emotions to a fever pitch. The Phantom Killer, exhaustively researched, is the only definitive nonfiction book on the case, and includes details from an unpublished account by a survivor, and rare, never-before-published photographs.

Although the case lives on today on television, the Internet, a revived fictional movie and even an off-Broadway play, with so much of the investigation shrouded in mystery since 1946, rumors and fractured facts have distorted the reality. Now, for the first time, a careful examination of the archival record, personal interviews, and stubborn fact checking come together to produce new insights and revelations on the old slayings.

The Only Living Witness: The true story of serial sex killer Ted Bundy by Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth : Michaud and Aynesworth are a reporter and an investigator team who interviewed serial killer Ted Bundy while he was on death row in Florida. This volume chronicles his activities throughout several states but is at its best in a long section of transcripts from the interview in which, while he never admits his quilt, Bundy offers vivid details of the crimes and commentary on the mindset of a serial killer. This revised edition includes some additional information.

Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky : In this unique book, Peter Vronsky documents the psychological, investigative, and cultural aspects of serial murder, beginning with its first recorded instance in Ancient Rome through fifteenth-century France on to such notorious contemporary cases as cannibal/necrophile Ed Kemper, the BTK killer, Henry Lee Lucas, Monte Ralph Rissell, Jerry Brudos, Richard Ramirez, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and the emergence of what he classifies as the “serial rampage killer” such as Andrew Cunanan, who murdered fashion designer Gianni Versace.

Vronsky not only offers sound theories on what makes a serial killer but also makes concrete suggestions on how to survive an encounter with one—from recognizing verbal warning signs to physical confrontational resistance. Exhaustively researched with transcripts of interviews with killers, and featuring up-to-date information on the apprehension and conviction of the Green River killer and the Beltway Snipers, Vronsky’s one-of-a-kind book covers every conceivable aspect of an endlessly riveting true crime phenomenon.

Escape from Alcatraz: The True Crime Classic by J. Campbell Bruce : In 1963, just weeks before the original publication of this book, the last prisoner was escorted off Devil’s Island and Alcatraz ceased to be a prison. Author J. Campbell Bruce chronicles in spellbinding detail the Rock’s transition from a Spanish fort to the maximum-security penitentiary that housed such infamous inmates as Robert Stroud, aka the Birdman of Alcatraz, and mobster Al “Scarface” Capone. The chapters describing the daring escape attempts by Frank Morris and two accomplices from this “inescapable” prison became the basis for the 1979 Clint Eastwood movie. Discover the intriguing and absorbing saga of Alcatraz, whose name is still synonymous with punitive isolation and deprivation, where America’s most violent and notorious prisoners resided in tortuous proximity to one of the world’s favorite cities.

Sins of the brother: The definitive story of Ivan Milat and the backpacker murders by Mark Whitaker and Les Kennedy : Seven young backpackers brutally murdered. A nationwide police hunt spanning three years and thousands of hours of forensic investigation. And finally, the capture and conviction of one man.Sins of the Brother tells the gripping story of road-worker Ivan Milat and the horrific Belanglo Forest murders that shocked the world and forever etched themselves into Australian criminal folklore. It explores a family culture so twisted and bizarre it would lead inexorably to a serial killing spree, scrutinises the police case – its successes and failures – and reveals the chilling mystery left behind.Told in novelistic style from interviews with the Milat family, key police investigators, Crown lawyers and the lucky souls who escaped with their lives, Sins of the Brother is a classic of crime literature – a psychological thriller come to life and a disturbing portrait of a man whose delusions became reality.’More than just the suspenseful story of some notoriously evil murders, this shocking and strangely seductive book is a painstaking examination of today’s society. This is Australia on the slab.’

[Part 1]

#true crime #tcoriginal #true crime research #true crime books #my posts

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bobbie-robron · 7 months ago

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Robert Sugden: Karl Davies (2002)

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onelittlebookgeek · 4 years ago

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Book Challenge 2020 (100 books!!) (I did it!!)

After forgetting to track my reading for three years, I started recording my reading on Tumblr last year again, and I’m committed to continuing that this year!

This year is my final year of my Bachelor’s Degrees (I’m finishing English in June) and I’m planning to do a gap year from September on, so now more university after June (at least as far as 2020 is concerned).

I do not really foresee any issues or obstacles to reading this year, except of course finishing my thesis which will probably take quite some time, so I do expect a decline around April until early June. Although I do have a lot more time off in my gap year, I used to read a lot of mandatory books for my studies, so I don’t know whether having a gap year will mean reading more books. Since I’m not doing any university studying, I am interested in reading academic books by myself, studying by myself. Those books are often longer, denser and just take more time to get through; consequently, I might read fewer books in the same amount of energy and time spent reading.

To make a (somewhat) long story short: my expectations are in line with the amount of books I’ve read in the last years, so I’m expecting to read 75 books this year!

Update: it’s mid-October and I’ve already read 99 books this year, so I’ve finished my original goal of 75 books! Now I’m going for 100 books (which should be easy to do, and after that we’ll just see how it goes!).

The crossed book is the one I’m currently reading, I’ve written reviews for books that have a (x) behind them, with the (x) being a link to my Goodreads review!

Update: Today (November 23) I’ve read 114 books so I’ve finished my challenge of 100 books! Right now, I’m still 25 books ahead schedule! Let’s see if I can keep that energy up!

January

The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin (5/5) (x)

Serpent and Dove (Serpent and Dove #1) - Shelby Mahurin (4/5) (x)

Lethal White (Cormoran Strike #4) - Robert Galbraith (4/5)

Weirdos from Another Planet (Calvin and Hobbes #4) - Bill Watterson) (5/5)

Selected Poems - E.E. Cummings (5/5) (x)

Niets zal ons redden maar een beetje liefde is oké - Henk van Straten (Dutch) (4/5) (x)

, said the shotgun to the head. - Saul Williams (4/5)

Loud and Yellow Laughter - Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese (3/5)

Fireborn (The Aurelian Cycle #1) - Rosaria Munda (4/5)

Sylvia Plath Poems Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy - Sylvia Plath (4/5) (x)

The Comedy of Errors - William Shakespeare (3/5) (x)

Nieuwe Herinneringen - Remco Campert (Dutch) (2/5)

Dido, Queen of Carthage - Christopher Marlowe (3/5)

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reid (4/5)

Alles wat er was - Stine Jensen (Dutch) (3/5)

Zij in de geschiedenis - Alies Pegtel (Dutch) (4/5) (x)

Good Omens - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (reread) (5/5)

February

Prometheus Bound - Aeschylus (3/5)

The Lost Hero (The Heroes of Olympus #1) - Rick Riordan (reread) (4/5)

The Son of Neptune (The Heroes of Olympus #2) - Rick Riordan (reread) (4/5)

So You Want to Talk About Race - Ijeoma Oluo (4/5)

The Mark of Athena (The Heroes of Olympus #3) - Rick Riordan (reread) (4/5)

Educated - Tara Westover (3/5)

Prometheus on Caucasus - Lucian of Samosata (3/5)

March

Reading Old English: A Primer and First Reader - Robert Hasenfratz (4/5) (x)

Still Foolin’ ‘Em: Where I’ve Been, Where I’m Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys? - Billy Crystal (3/5)

The House of Hades (The Heroes of Olympus #4) - Rick Riordan (reread) (4/5)

Quick Question: New Poems - John Ashberry (1/5) (x)

Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose - Michael H. Short (3/5) (x)

The Call of the Wild - Jack London (2/5) (x)

The Blood of Olympus (The Heroes of Olympus #5) - Rick Riordan (reread) (4/5)

April

The Waste Land - T.S. Eliot (reread) (5/5)

And Still I Rise - Maya Angelou (4/5)

Poëzie in Utrechtse Muren - Ingmar Heytze (Dutch) (5/5) (x)

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf (4/5)

Mijn dood en ik - Remco Campert (4/5)

Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster - Mike Davis (3/5)

Native Son - Richard Wright (2/5)

Dido, Queen of Carthage - Christopher Marlowe (reread) (4/5)

May

The Plague - Albert Camus (4/5)

Absalom! Absalom! - William Faulkner (4/5)

Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance - Carrie J. Preston (2/5)

James Joyce and Sexuality - Richard Brown (3/5)

June

Daisy Jones & the Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid (4/5) (x)

Modernism, Sex and Gender - Alison Pease and Celia Marshik (3/5)

The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles’ Antigone - Seamus Heaney (4/5)

The Host - Stephanie Meyer (reread) (4/5)

The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games #1) - Suzanne Collins (reread) (4/5)

Catching Fire (The Hunger Games #2) - Suzanne Collins (reread) (4/5) (x)

A Terrible Beauty is Born - W.B. Yeats (4/5)

Mockingjay (The Hunger Games #3) - Suzanne Collins (reread) (4/5)

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism - Robin DiAngelo (4/5)

Are Prisons Obsolete? - Angela Y. Davis (4/5)

The Final Empire (Mistborn #1) - Brandon Sanderson (4/5)

Everything Leads to You - Nina LaCour (2/5) (x)

The Tempest - William Shakespeare (reread) (3/5)

July

Hag-Seed - Margaret Atwood (4/5) (x)

American Slavery (A Very Short Introduction) - Andrea Heather William (reread) (3/5)

Angels & Demons (Robert Langdom #1) - Dan Brown (4/5) (x)

Mythos: A Retelling of Myths of Ancient Greece - Stephen Fry (4/5) (x)

Mean Time - Carol Ann Duffy (3/5)

Lijfrente - Vrouwkje Tuinman (Dutch) (4/5)

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games #0) - Suzanne Collins (3/5) (x)

Sonnets from the Portuguese - Elizabeth Barrett Browning (3/5)

A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf (reread) (5/5)

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (4/5)

Onbreekbaar - Hans Hagen (Dutch) (1/5) (x)

The Penelopiad - Margaret Atwoord (reread) (4/5)

The Importance of Being Ernest - Oscar Wilde (5/5)

Het goede leven: een briefwisseling - Piet Gerbrandy & Andreas Kinneging (Dutch) (2/5) (x)

Constructions of the Classical Body - James Porter (3/5)

August

The Complete Poems - Anne Sexton (4/5)

The Kissing Booth (The Kissing Booth #1) - Beth Reekles (2/5) (x)

The Daily Show: The Book - Chris Smith (4/5) (x)

The Duchess Deal (Girl meets Duke #1) - Tessa Dare (3/5)

Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehesi Coates (4/5)

Fragments - Heraclitus (transl. by Brooks Haxton) (2/5) (x)

Animal Farm - George Orwell (reread) (5/5)

The Hidden Oracle (The Trials of Apollo #1) - Rick Riordan (reread) (4/5)

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue (Montague Siblings #1) - Mackenzi Lee (reread) (4/5)

Kitchen - Banana Yoshimoto (4/5)

Catilina’s Riddle (Roma sub Rosa #3) - Steven Saylor (2/5) (x)

When Dimple met Rishi (Dimple and Rishi #1) - Sandhya Memon (1/5) (x)

Adulthood is a Myth (Sarah’s Scribbles #1) - Sarah Andersen (4/5)

September

Normal People - Sally Rooney (3/5) (x)

Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age - Donna Zuckerberg (4/5)

Sadie: A Novel - Courtney Summers (4/5)

The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus (4/5)

Vloedlijnen - Piet Gerbrandy (Dutch) (4/5)

Red, White and Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston (reread) (4/5)

This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor - Adam Kay (4/5)

Envelope Poems - Emily Dickinson (4/5) (x)

A Murder on the Orient Express (Hercule Poirot #10) - Agatha Christie (3/5) (x)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce (4/5)

October

Titus Andronicus - William Shakespeare (4/5) (x)

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Hercule Poirot #1) - Agatha Christie (4/5) (x)

Het verhaal van Aeneas - Vergilius (trans. to Dutch) (reread) (4/5)

If Beale Street Could Talk - James Baldwin (2/5)

Lesbia, Verzen van Liefde en Spot - Catullus (Dutch) (transl. by Paul Claes) (4/5) (x)

The Nightingale - Kristin Hannah (4/5) (x)

The Cat Inside - William S. Burroughs (reread) (5/5)

The Murder on the Links (Hercule Poirot #2) - Agatha Christie (3/5)

November

Such a Fun Age - Kiley Reid (3/5) (x)

Narratology and Classics: a Practical Guide - Irene de Jong (3/5) (x)

The Murder of Roger Akroyd (Hercule Poirot #4) - Agatha Christie (4/5) (x)

The ABC Murders (Hercule Poirot #11) - Agatha Christie (4/5)

The Great Cat (Poetry Collection) - ed. by Emily Fragos (3/5) (x)

Weapons of Math Destruction - Cathy O’Neil (4/5)

The Northern Lights (His Dark Materials #1) - Philip Pullman (4/5)

Vincent van Gogh en zijn brieven - Leo Jansen (Dutch) (3/5)

My Dark Vanessa - Kate Elizabeth Russell (4/5)

The Fill-In Boyfriend - Kasie West (reread) (4/5)

Poirot Investigates (Hercule Poirot #3) - Agatha Christie (1/5)

My 2019 challenge

My 2016 challenge

My 2015 challenge

My 2014 challenge

My 2013 challenge

#2020 book challenge #onelittlebookgeek #2020 #goodreads #goodreads challenge #book challenge

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Upcoming Movies in October 2020: Theaters, Streaming and VOD

https://ift.tt/3lducG3

October looks a lot different than it did only a few weeks ago. As the month many movie theater owners were hanging their hats on with the hope of a weekly deluge of new movies , October has recently been vacated by high profile features that include Wonder Woman 1984, Death on the Nile, and Candyman.

Yet if you’re a cinephile or movie lover who is desperate for new stories and visions, it is not all doom and gloom. Between the streaming market of Netflix, VOD, and other platforms, as well as some smaller films willing to roll the dice on a limited theatrical release, there are still more than a few things to see in October 2020…

2067

October 2 (U.S. Only)

A high-concept science fiction setup if we’ve ever heard one, 2067 is the story of Ethan Whyte (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a young man born in a dystopian future where he learns that he might be the savior of humanity… at least that’s what people from an even more distant future are saying. In a plot twist that sounds, at least on paper, akin to a reversal of The Terminator, messengers from the future say Ethan is the key to saving the world and wish to transport him via time machine to an unknowable destiny. Chaos ensues. It’s a big idea, but we’re always game for someone swinging big in this genre.

Death of Me

October 2 (November 23 in the UK)

Darren Lynn Boseman, director of Saw II through Saw IV, returns to the horror genre again alongside Nikita’s Maggie Q and Westworld’s Luke Hemsworth. In this VOD release, the pair play a vacationing couple who wake up on an island with a horrible hangover. Yet a video on their phones seems to suggest the night before was even worse: Neil (Hemsworth) spent the evening brutally murdering his wife, as per the screen in their pockets. Nevertheless, here they are now, left with a lot of questions of what happened yesterday… and what can happen today.

Black Box

October 6

The first of Amazon Prime and Blumhouse Productions’ “Welcome to the Blumhouse” series, Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour’s Black Box has a tantalizing premise. Nolan (Mamoudou Athie) survived a car accident that took his wife, but it also took large swaths of his memory of her. So in order to regain his memory, and regain a sense of stability for his young daughter, Nolan undergoes an experimental treatment where his psychologist uses hypnosis to thrust him into his subconscious where he’ll be able remember his past and face his personal demons. Literally.

Like something out of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, this horror movie shows how scary being trapped in dreams really is if all that’s in them is the stuff of nightmares…

The Lie

October 6

The second Amazon/Blumhouse feature is more of a psychological thriller than a straightforward horror movie. Originally premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018, The Lie follows a father (Peter Sarsgaard) who discovers his daughter Kayla (Joey King) accidentally killed her friend… until she admits she may have actually murdered her.

How far will he go to cover-up his daughter’s sins? Well, that’s the logline, and it seems to be a gripping one, albeit reviews from TIFF were less than kind two years ago.

Hubie Halloween

October 7

Last year Adam Sandler warned the Academy that if he doesn’t win an Oscar for Uncut Gems he’d make a film so bad that it’d make “you all pay.” Well, he wasn’t even nominated and eight months after the ceremony, here we are with Netflix’s Hubie Halloween. It remains to be seen whether this is actually the bad one—for starters it filmed before Oscar nominations went out—but it is still very much a Happy Madison production, complete with major supporting roles for Kevin James and Rob Schneider.

Movies

Uncut Gems: The Real Noir in Adam Sandler’s Classic

By David Crow

Movies

Horror Movies on HBO Max: Hammer Films, It Chapter 2, Us, to Arrive in October

By Don Kaye

In the movie, Sandler plays Hubie Dubois, the town loser of Salem, Massachusetts. A lonely fry cook obsessed with Halloween, Hubie spends all year looking forward to decking out his home and town the same way Clark Griswold anticipates Christmas. But on this particular Halloween, the town appears besieged by actual supernatural forces, and finally Hubie will have his time to shine. Eh, it looks more amusing than The Do-Over and The Ridiculous 6?

Books of Blood

October 7 (U.S. Only)

Who doesn’t love anthological horror? Hulu certainly does, as they’re releasing Books of Blood, the latest adaptation of Clive Barker’s multi-volume series of short stories by the same name. Previous tales from Books of Blood have been adapted into movies as beloved as Candyman and as decidedly not as Rawhide Rex. In this film version, three stories are created for the screen by co-writer and director Brannon Braga. Here’s hoping it lands closer to the former?

Saint Maud

October 9 (UK Only)

The UK will be the first to get A24’s only horror movie this year. Lucky. The feature directorial debut of Rose Glass, Saint Maud follows an unhealthily repressed and zealous young woman: Maud (Morfydd Clark). Maud is technically a caretaker by trade, looking after people in hospice. But she also imagines herself to be something of an apostle, sent to save godless folks from their sins, particularly Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), the woman she’s living with as the in-home nurse.

Movies

Best Modern Horror Movies

By Don Kaye

Movies

Best Horror Movies on Netflix: Scariest Films to Stream

By David Crow and 2 others

It’s already a tense situation, even before Maud starts hearing voices and having images of ecstasy and Heaven, and demons and Hell. Rich with atmosphere and grueling anticipation of something horrible happening, Saint Maud is a great debut for Glass and a potential star-maker for Clark, who is skin-crawlingly pious as Maud, the young woman who’s wound up tighter than a jack-in-the-box.

The Wolf of Snow Hollow

October 9 (U.S. Only)

Debuting in theaters and on VOD, The Wolf of Snow Hollow is Jim Cummings’ follow-up to Thunder Road. That earlier, underrated movie was a delightful mix of comedy and drama that won the SXSW Grand Jury Prize. So the sophomore effort being a werewolf comedy-horror movie is intriguing. Indeed, Wolf of Snow Hollow is the rare lycanthrope yarn that’s told from the point-of-view of the would-be wolf hunter, Sheriff John Marshall (Cummings).

Following a series of grisly murders every full moon, the residents of Snow Hollow become convinced they have a wolfman on their hands, even if the frustrated sheriff refuses to accept the obvious. The film also marks the final performance of Robert Forster as John’s crusty mentor.

The War with Grandpa

October 9 in the U.S. (October 16 in the UK)

For most people, having Robert De Niro as a grandfather can be an imposing experience. But kids these days! That’s at least one amusing takeaway from The War with Grandpa, the delayed family movie that sees De Niro’s grandfatherly Ed enter into a prank war with his grandson Peter (Oakes Fegley) after upsetting the youth by moving into his old bedroom—Peter’s mom and Ed’s daughter Sally (Uma Thurman) forced them into the arrangement.

Movies

The King of Comedy: What’s the Real Punchline of the Martin Scorsese Classic?

By Tony Sokol

Movies

Al Capone: 9 Actors Who Played the Original Scarface

By Tony Sokol

Soon shaving cream reveals itself to be foam sealant stuck to De Niro’s face, and Peter’s oral report announces he is a louse. Oh, and there’s a dodgeball battle in which De Niro is aided by a squad of screen legends like Christopher Walken, Cheech Marin, and Jane Seymour, to squash the pups. Now things are getting serious…

Nocturne

October 13

The first of Amazon and Blumhouse’s next batch of original movies, Nocturne is the tale of a hellish rivalry between sisters. Genuinely. The feature debut from director Zu Quirke stars Sydney Sweeney as Juliet, the younger sister of fellow musician Vivian (Madison Iseman). While both young women are gifted pianists, Vivian is a prodigy and the center of Juliet’s envy. That is until Juliet finds the diary of another child prodigy at their prestigious conservatory who killed herself. The book includes all the late pianist’s hidden compositions… and symbols and incantations.

Ever heard the story of Faust? It seems like Juliet is about to get an up-close modern example.

Evil Eye

October 13

As the final Blumhouse effort to be released on Amazon Prime in 2020, Evil Eye hails from directors Elan and Rajeev Dassani and presents itself as both a psychological thriller and supernatural chiller. The truth of which it really is depends on how much you believe the eye of Usha (Sarita Choudhury).

Movies

How Jason Blum Changed Horror Movies

By Rosie Fletcher

Movies

Jason Blum: No Plans To Restart Universal Monsters Universe

By Don Kaye

For this mother of Pallavi (GLOW’s Sunita Mani) is convinced her daughter is necking with a new boyfriend (Omar Maskati) who’s the spirit of an evil abusive ex Usha escaped in her youth. Is he the vestiges of a half-remembered curse or the potential victim of a mommy dearest prone to snap judgements? Tune in to find out for yourself…

The Trial of the Chicago 7

October 16

“The whole world is watching.” That’s the chanted refrain of protestors in Aaron Sorkin’s second movie as director, but it might also apply to the level of anticipation regarding this major Netflix release and potential awards season darling. The movie itself is an old-fashioned legal thriller like Sorkin cut his teeth on with scripts like A Few Good Men, but Chicago 7 feels urgently (and depressingly) vital.

Following on the heels of the Chicago riots during the Democratic National Convention of 1968—riots later deemed to have been started by the police—eight men categorized as “the far left” are rounded up for a show trial by Nixon’s Justice Department where they’re charged with conspiracy.

Movies

Aaron Sorkin: Donald Trump Made The Trial of the Chicago 7 Movie Possible

By David Crow

Movies

Quentin Tarantino Calls The Social Network the Best Movie of the 2010s

By David Crow

The film features the same blistering abundance of dialogue Sorkin has become famous for, as well as his penchant for breezy fast-paced editing. But the political heft of the subject matter and the movie’s deep bench of an acting ensemble that includes Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eddie Redmayne, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mark Rylance, and Frank Langella is what makes this one of the most thrilling movies of the year.

Honest Thief

October 16 (U.S. Only)

Liam Neeson plays a thief who wants a second chance. A bank robber willing to turn himself and $9 million in to be with the new love of his life. But then crooked FBI agents (Jai Courtney and Anthony Ramos) steal his money and frame him for murder instead. So he’s left with one thing to do: menacingly hiss over the phone, “I’m coming for you.” We imagine that trailer-ready threat was what Honest Thief was sold on during its elevator pitch.

Rebecca

October 21

Remaking Alfred Hitchcock remains a tricky proposition that has thwarted many filmmakers in the past. Readapting the only one of his movies to win the Oscar for Best Picture, Rebecca, appears all the harder. Yet everything we’ve seen from Ben Wheatley and Netflix’s luscious adaptation of the Daphne Du Maurier novel is highly encouraging.

With a winning cast that includes Lily James as the new Mrs. de Winter, Armie Hammer as her husband Maxim, and Kristin Scott Thomas as his menacing housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, the film opens with the young bride trying to step into the shoes of Maxim’s dead first wife, Rebecca. An apparent light of his mansion that has been long snuffed, Rebecca’s flame burns still if only because of Mrs. Danvers’ admiration for her late mistress… and maybe the ghost who prowls the house. This is archetypal Gothic horror, and with screenwriter Jane Goldman apparently keeping the novel’s original ending, we already feel seduced by the imagery.

On the Rocks

October 2 in the UK (October 23 in the U.S.)

Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray work together again. For the first time since their luminous Lost in Translation (if you ignore the ill-considered A Very Murray Christmas), the director and star are collaborating on this visibly intimate tale. It’s about an adult daughter (Rashida Jones) and her famous father (Murray) spending a weekend in New York City on an adventure after years of estrangement.

Movies

10 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies

By Michael Leader

Movies

8 Essential Gothic Horror Movies

By David Crow and 1 other

The film, which also stars Marlon Wayans, premiered to a largely warm reception at the New York Film Festival and is already being written about as a spiritual successor to their original collaboration. Once more a woman in the midst of an existential crisis is aided by Murray between glasses of scotch. Who doesn’t want to pull up a seat and order another round?

Over the Moon

October 23

You probably don’t know Glen Keane’s name but you should. The longtime Walt Disney Animation Studios animator oversaw the design and animation of Ariel in The Little Mermaid, Beast in Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin in Aladdin, and Rapunzel in Tangled. With Over the Moon, he steps away from the Mouse and toward Netflix as a first-time co-director, alongside John Kahrs (an animator on Tangled and Frozen).

The trailer for the film is like a Georges Méliès fever dream from as a little girl named Fei Fei (Cathy Ang) builds a rocket ship to take her to the moon. But once there, Fei Fei and friends meet a mythical moon goddess (Hamilton’s Phillipa Soo) who takes them on a candy-colored odyssey through the cosmos.

Synchronic

October 23 (U.S. only)

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Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are two of the most intriguing new voices in science fiction. If you don’t recognize their names, go watch The Endless right now. One of the strangest and cleverest sci-fi yarns of the last decade, that film is now being followed up by Synchronic, another original tale that stars Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan. The specifics of the film remain vague other than it is about two New Orleans paramedics who investigate a series of murders caused by a new, bizarre designer drug. But we already know we can’t wait to watch what horrible side effects come from these poor bastards taking it.

The Craft: Legacy

It cannot be Halloween without at least one more horror movie coming out the week of. Thus enters The Craft: Legacy, Sony Pictures and Blumhouse Productions’ legacy sequel to the original 1996 The Craft. Like its predecessor, this follows an outsider who is the new girl in school (Cailee Spaeny). She may be ostracized by the popular kids, but she befriends fellow students who have alternative tastes… like witchcraft.

The original is a touchstone for millennials and Gen-Xers of a certain age, and this reboot looks to push the story into a more complex understanding of friendship. And if it doesn’t, it’s still a Blumhouse effort so it should have plenty of spooky jumps!

Relic

October 30 (US Only)

Dementia is at the heart of this very eerie chiller where three generations of women convene in an old family home which seems to be rotting from the inside. Robyn Nevin, Emily Mortimer and Bella Heathcote star in a slow build drama which delves into the horror of losing your sense of self, as Nevin’s matriarch goes missing for days and can’t remember what happened while her house is filled with odd notes, black mould and snippets of a life slipping away from her grasp. This is the feature debut of Australian-Japanese director Natalie Erika James and it’s a stylish, chilling and confident first feature with a final act that veers into full blown horror. Out already in the States on VOD it has a UK theatrical release in the UK.

The post Upcoming Movies in October 2020: Theaters, Streaming and VOD appeared first on Den of Geek.

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balioc · 5 years ago

Text

BALIOC’S READING LIST, 2019 EDITION

This list counts only published books, consumed in published-book format, that I read for the first time and finished. No rereads, nothing abandoned halfway through, no Internet detritus of any kind, etc. Also no children’s picture books.

1. In a Time of Treason, David Keck

2. A King In Cobwebs, David Keck

3. War In Human Civilization, Azar Gat

4. The Kingdom of Copper, S. A. Chakraborty

5. The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, Winifred Fallers Sullivan

6. The Winter of the Witch, Katherine Arden

7. Out of the Silent Planet, C. S. Lewis

8. Perelandra, C. S. Lewis

9. The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis

10. Underlord, Will Wight

11. The Devil-Wives of Li Fong, E. Hoffman Price

12. How to Hide an Empire: The History of the Greater United States, Daniel Immerwahr

13. The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie

14. The Rage of Dragons, Evan Winter

15. The Bird King, G. Willow Wilson

16. A Betrayal In Winter, Daniel Abraham

17. An Autumn War, Daniel Abraham

18. The Price of Spring, Daniel Abraham

19. Chartism, Thomas Carlyle

20. Impro: Improvisation and the Theater, Keith Johnstone

21. A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine

22. Foundryside, Robert Jackson Bennett

23. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest Stats, James C. Scott

24. The Ruin of Kings, Jenn Lyons

25. Ship of Smoke and Steel, Django Wexler

26. Pan, Knut Hamsun

27. The Unbound Empire, Melissa Caruso

28. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation For Failure, Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt

29. Empire of Sand, Tasha Suri

30. Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson

31. A Brightness Long Ago, Guy Gavriel Kay

32. The Riddle-Master of Hed, Patricia McKillip

33. Heir of Sea and Fire, Patricia McKillip

34. Harpist In the Wind, Patricia McKillip

35. Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, Francis Fukuyama

36. Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire

37. The Witchwood Crown, Tad Williams

38. Empire of Grass, Tad Williams

39. Ten Restaurants That Changed America, Paul Freedman

40. The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon

41. The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith

42. Wyrms, Orson Scott Card

43. Seedfolks, Paul Fleischman

44. The Axe and the Throne, M. D. Ireman

45. The Sun King, Nancy Mitford

46. The Demons of King Solomon, various (ed. Aaron J. French)

47. Towards a New Socialism, W. Paul Cockshott & Allin F. Cottrell

48. The Oracle Glass, Judith Merkle Riley

49. The Orphans of Raspay, Lois McMaster Bujold

50. Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness In the West, Cormac McCarthy

51. Lent, Jo Walton

52. Empress of Forever, Max Gladstone

53. Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood, Trevor Noah

54. The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead

55. The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism, Leigh Phillips & Michal Rozworski

56. Turning Darkness Into Light, Marie Brennan

57. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell

58. The Initiate Brother, Sean Russell

59. Gatherer of Clouds, Sean Russell

60. Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, Mary Eberstadt

61. The New Achilles, Christian Cameron

62. World Without End, Sean Russell

63. Sea Without a Shore, Sean Russell

64. Uncrowned, Will Wight

65. A Brief History of Indonesia: Sultans, Spices, and Tsunamis: The Incredible Story of Southeast Asia's Largest Nation, Tim Hannigan

66. The Vagrant, Peter Newman

67. Jade War, Fonda Lee

68. The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith

69. The Hod King, Josiah Bancroft

70. The Name of All Things, Jenn Lyons

71. Cold Iron, Miles Cameron [Christian Cameron]

72. Dark Forge, Miles Cameron [Christian Cameron]

73. Emily of New Moon, Lucy Maude Montgomery

74. Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, Ben Mcintyre

75. The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow

76. Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky: Myths of Mexico, David Bowles

77. Flowers In the Mirror, Li Ruzhen

78. Bright Steel, Miles Cameron [Christian Cameron]

79. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Dave Grossman

80. That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis

***********

Plausible works of improving nonfiction consumed in 2019: 19

Works consumed in 2019 by women: 24

Works consumed in 2019 by men: 55

Works consumed in 2018 by both men and women: 1

Balioc’s Choice Award, fiction division: Lent

>>>> Honorable mention: A Betrayal in Winter et al

Balioc’s Choice Award, nonfiction division: Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

>>>> Honorable mention: War In Human Civilization

Cultural Heritage Award For “Holy Crap This Will Fuck You Up”: The Great Divorce

Cultural Heritage Award For “This Will Not Fuck You Up Nearly as Much as the Author Thinks It Will, or Maybe I Was Just In a Cranky Un-Receptive Frame of Mind”: That Hideous Strength

**********

A year of progress, I think. This is probably About Enough Reading. More nonfiction than before, although not enough (and too many things that I wanted to be Really Enlightening turned out to be duds). More literary classics too. A lot of modern genre fiction that was pretty-good-but-definitely-not-great.

#yearly reading list

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dweemeister · 5 years ago

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The Phenix City Story (1955)

Southeastern Alabama and southwestern Georgia are separated by the Chattahoochee River. Along the Alabamian banks of this river is Phenix City which, for over a century, became known as, “Sin City, USA”. Organized crime in league with the police department dealt in illicit drugs, fraud, rigged gambling operations, prostitution, and violence. These syndicates flourished on and around Phenix City’s 14th Street, and many of 14th Street’s patrons were Army soldiers visiting from nearby Fort Benning, Georgia (during the Civil War, deserting Confederate soldiers frequented Phenix City). So entrenched was Phenix City’s lawlessness that the city, state, and federal governments declined to do much to combat the organized crime. But in 1954, lawyer and Phenix City resident Albert Patterson ran for Attorney General of Alabama – campaigning partly on a platform to reform his hometown – and won. The Attorney General-elect’s assassination shortly before his swearing-in meant that Sin City, USA’s days were numbered.

With the events in Phenix City still in the news, Hollywood came knocking. Poverty Row studio Allied Artists envisioned an idea for a new movie – fast-tracking The Phenix City Story, directed by Phil Karlson (best known for his ‘50s film noirs) and a screenplay from Daniel Mainwaring (1947’s Out of the Past, 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and Crane Wilbur (best known for acting alongside Pearl White in the 1914 serial The Perils of Pauline). Barely a year had passed since Albert Patterson’s assassination by the time of The Phenix City Story’s controversial release: this is a shockingly violent film for ‘50s Hollywood, and the film’s thirteen-minute documentary prologue was censored in the American South. Given Allied Artists’ lack of resources compared to the major Hollywood studios, The Phenix City Story is roughly acted, edited, and shot on occasion. But the film, shot on location and sometimes resembling a documentary, pulsates in its violent immediacy. Over time, it has shed its modest background to become a solid film noir.

Local lawyer Albert “Pat” Patterson (John McIntire) has lived in Phenix City for much of his life, privately despising the immorality plaguing downtown. Rhett Tanner (Edward Andrews) is the owner of Tanner’s Poppy Club – a den of booze and gambling where a bloody fistfight is shrugged off. Despite their disagreements, Pat and Tanner are friends and when the latter asks Pat to be part of a new citizens’ safety committee, he declines. Too many such committees have been created over the decades, sometimes masquerading as fronts for aiding criminal operations. However, Pat remarks, he is looking forward to something special. His son, John (Richard Kiley), is returning home from Germany after several years of prosecuting Nazi war criminals with wife Mary Jo (Lenka Peterson) and their children. When John, Mary Jo, and the children arrive, John is disappointed and Mary Jo is distraught at how Phenix City’s red-light district continues to be a hive of scum and villainy. A rapid turn of events involving the Patterson family’s friends and acquaintances – Ellie Rhodes (Kathryn Grant), Zeke Ward (James Edwards), and Ed Gage (Truman Smith) – will precipitate into a wave of assaults, bombings, and homicides that force Pat to run for Attorney General of Alabama.

Preceding most prints of The Phenix City Story is an introduction by journalist Clete Roberts, famous for his radio news reports, by then working for KNXT-TV (later KCBS) in Los Angeles, and is today best remembered for his role in two memorable episodes of M*A*S*H. Roberts, in the highly formal yet folksy journalistic style of mid-century America, interviews people who were close to the Patterson family or witnessed Phenix City’s violence leading up to Albert Patterson’s assassination. Roberts’ reporting is not as polished as it would eventually become. This makes the on-location prologue difficult to sit through, as Roberts asks too many leading questions and undeveloped questions that can be answered in one or a few words. The interviews do not flow smoothly between subjects. While these thirteen minutes make the rest of the film feel like a cinéma verité (generally, observational cinema) documentary within the mold of moody film noir, it can be grating to sit through. This review is based on a print of the film with the prologue included.

According to Ben Mankiewicz’s outro to the film on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) in January 2020, the prologue was placed into The Phenix City Story to allow the film’s violence – the film is not beyond brutal brawls and hoodlums murdering children – to bypass the Hays Code (which censored what could be shown in American movies until 1968, when it was replaced by the present-day MPA ratings system). If the film’s violence could be framed like a documentary, the censors agreed to allow depictions of bloodied characters, sultry women baring their legs, and a casual use of the epithet “nigger” by police officers on the syndicates’ payroll. The prologue – however flawed it is – allows The Phenix City Story to be as brutal as it is. Some theaters in the American South, noting that there was no requirement to show the longer version of the film (the one containing the prologue) they were provided, refused to show the prints with the prologue, deeming the Roberts interviews as inflammatory and impugning the South’s reputation.

Perhaps Allied Artists executives did not think the American moviegoing audience was ready for a diatribe on race relations, but one can see the United States’ historic racial violence at the film’s extremities, waiting to burst alongside the film’s general depiction of Phenix City’s criminal corruption. The film’s most horrifying moment is when Zeke Ward’s child is murdered by Tanner’s hitmen. Zeke, a black employee at Tanner’s Poppy Club who abandons his job after being barely involved on John Patterson’s side of a vicious clash, is targeted for being sympathetic to the Pattersons. That Tanner chose a black person as his first victim is no coincidence; when the police receive word of his murdered child, the officer on the line hangs up the phone and tells his colleagues: “Somebody just threw a dead nigger kid on Patterson’s lawn. Go out and have a look.” There is no urgent inflection in the officer’s voice, as if that call is considered less important because the victim is not white. As a partial aside, those few seconds make me wonder what the censors thought in that moment, as the Hays Code forbade “vulgarity and suggestiveness”, and recommended “good taste” in the depiction of law enforcement; nevertheless, enforcement over the use of “nigger” and other racial epithets did not have a consistently-enforced standard or discernible pattern of contextual exceptions. The Phenix City Story does not concentrate on race for the purposes of telling its story, but the white gangsters and their enablers imply – through their behavior, and if I may appropriate and slightly alter this contemporary line – that black lives could not matter any less.

The Phenix City Story is filled with unfamiliar faces; only those fluent in classic television (and I am not) might squint in half-recognition of the actors involved. There are no bravura performances here, but John McIntire and Edward Andrews – as the elders of this tale, Albert Patterson and Rhett Tanner – stand out from an otherwise lackluster crowd. George White’s (1946’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1947’s Green Dolphins Street) editing is consistent. To his credit, The Phenix City Story, outside of the prologue, is never dull as it blasts away at a rocket’s pace. But during the film’s most violent moments, White’s editing fails to hide some of Allied Artists’ low-budget limitations. In the moment where Zeke’s murdered child is tossed out of a car, White fails to hide the fact that the child is a dummy. On my first viewing, I found myself confused about what the dummy was supposed to be. Was it a plastic alligator, a wooden log? Whatever it was, it looked so terribly phony that I couldn’t contain my laughter. Cut to a close-up of the child’s lifeless face. I realize my laughter arrived at the worst possible time. Good thing I watched this film alone. Nevertheless, a better attempt at editing or an alternative angle could have deemphasized the artifice here and spared me (and probably many others) the mortification of laughing at the worst possible time.

The collaboration between director Phil Karlson and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring led The Phenix City Story down the path of film noir. Karlson’s experience with film noir and Mainwaring’s expertise in tackling material taking place in small-town America gift this film its lurid, sweltering Southern atmosphere. The Southern hospitality disguising traces of malevolence, the notion that residential Phenix City is supposedly far away – geographically and culturally – from 14th Street, and the familiar banter between acquaintances who know each other’s names and families help The Phenix City Story feel authentic to the audience. It makes the film’s violence personal, even when the Pattersons are nowhere near the camera. Karlson, with journeyman Allied Artists cinematographer Harry Neumann (1940’s Midnight Limited, 1959’s The Wasp Woman), implement the chiaroscuro lighting characteristic in film noir to chilling effect – most notably as John Patterson walks into 14th Street on his first night back to visit the drugstore.

Alabamians who lived through or close to the times of The Phenix City Story say that the film achieves the atmosphere of what life in Alabama was like in the mid-1950s, even though the film contains numerous fabrications to dramatize the narrative. The real John Patterson became Governor of Alabama in 1959 and, ironically in comparison to his depiction here, was a segregationist politician. But Patterson, who later renounced those segregationist views, was considered a liberal figure in Alabama, and he was immediately followed by George Wallace. Following its prologue, The Phenix City Story convulses in rage. It denounces fully the criminal skullduggery that made possible a century of ill repute, though not the white racism that it barely brushes. And despite its technical hiccups and occasional dubious acting, it is a prime example of Southern-set film noir.

My rating: 7.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, click here.

#The Phenix City Story #Phil Karlson #John McIntire #Richard Kiley #Kathryn Grant #Edward Andrews #James Edwards #Lenka Peterson #Biff McGuire #Truman Smith #Clete Roberts #Daniel Mainwaring #Crane Wilbur #Harry Neumann #TCM #My Movie Odyssey

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