Rest In Peace David Carradine...

The Carradine family are that rarest of entities-Hollywood "B" movie royalty. The patriarch of the clan, John Carradine was one of Hollywood's most colorful and reliable character actors. His son David, who of course was just found dead of an apparent suicide succeeded his father as the one "B" movie actor who has a mystique and even a grandeur that was mesmerizing even when appearing in genre work. Many of David Carradine's eulogies mentioned his work in Kung Fu and Kill Bill, but of equal import in Carradine's film work was his elegant turn as "Frankenstiein" the masterful cross country racer in the drive in classic Death Race 2000 (1972). He starred with the soon to be famous Sylvester Stallone and Carradine manages to look oddly charasmatic and operatic in his black leather outfit (with cape!)

Movie of the Week...Cemetery Man

Cemetery Man is a strange combination of schlock and drawing room comedy. An Italian horror film from 1994 starring Rupert Everett as the ostensible character who has to repel zombies (eventually including his love interest-glamorous Anna Falchi) with numbing regularity

This is Everett’s most unusual role so far in his career. The film has some connections to an Italian horror/superhero comic called Dylan Dog (the author of the novel that Cemetery Man is based on is the creator of the Dylan Dog character). It is a little confusing, but Everett is seemingly playing a version of the “Dylan Dog” character (his supernatural doings and outfit connect to the characters comic roots and persona. (A bit of trivia; the Dylan Dog character’s comic look was based on Rupperet Everett’s “look”).

Everett’s character (officially named Francisco Dellamorte is a throwback to the unflappable universal Horror film heroes like Basil Rathbone who waltzed through supernatural scenarios with insouciance and Elan...

Great Unknown Christopher Lee Dracula cameo in The Magic Christian...

A weird relic of the 60's with a plethora of pop culture figures who mattered at the time including Ringo Starr, Peter Sellars, John Cleese, Roman Polanski and Yul Brynner (in drag)-The Magic Christian has a great, pretty much unknown cameo by Christopher Lee in his Dracula persona.

Underrated Classic; Nadja (1994)

With a great performance by Peter Fonda as Van Helsing, Nadja is a kind of time capsule of 90's hipness filtered through a classic vampire tale. The film has great performances by some of the hippest actors of the 90's (many of whom are MIA in the present decade): Elina Lowensohn (Nadja), Martin Donovan, Galaxy Craze, Jared Harris, and a great cameo by Producer David Lynch.
This film has held up nicely and has elements of the great, cult sequel to Dracula's Daughter as well.

Great performance: John Carradine in House of Dracula

John Carradine was one of Hollywood's great hams, but in his performances as Dracula he showed a rare restraint (in the most showy of roles) and even sensuality. His deep, resonant voice is perfect here and does not call attention to itself as in many of his other roles. Director Erle Kenton calls on some of his brilliance that he showcased but once in Island of Lost Souls to make a min/underrated classic.

Phallic Frenzy Author Joseph Lanza explains Ken Russell for you...

Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films(Chicago Review Press)
interview with Author Joseph Lanza



Ken Russell's cinematic work and style is so unusual that he usually gets compared to an artist such as Bosch or a writer such as HP Lovecraft rather than any particular film artist (Although he and Nic Roeg seem to get lumped together a lot-Roeg might be David to Russell's Bosch)-The first full-legnth biography of the one time enfant terrible of British Cinema has just been written by Joseph Lanza (who also wrote a biography of Nicolas Roeg and Elevator Music: A Sureal History of Muzak). Mr. Lanza was nice enough to conduct an email interview with FSW about Russell and his work.

MR: You seem to have a special insight and appreciation into the work and "vision" of Ken Russell. How do you account for this and did you suspect you might have a special affinity for him before you began this book?


JL: "I have had an affinity for much of Ken Russell’s work for decades. In the seventies, I had enjoyed The Music Lovers and especially The Devils, but oddly, the film that got me really thinking about Russell was Valentino. Though under-rated, even among its own director at times, Valentino (at least most of it) shows top-notch directing, with staccato dialogue and the kind of overblown acting I associate with the sixties television series Batman. And amid this camp and gaudy glamour, Russell had the courage to put in a scene where Rudolph Valentino is symbolically raped in a prison – it’s the point in the film that veers into true horror. The producers wanted to scissor the scene out, but Russell fought and won to keep it in. This made me realize Russell’s uncompromising style and vision."



MR: Russell seemed to have a real interest in casting interesting performers, but not necessarily polished actors in fairly high profile parts (Nureyev in Valentino for example). Was this something he did deliberately or was it simply a component of his unorthodox outlook?



JL: "I think he had to do it deliberately. He has sometimes lamented Nureyev’s bad acting, but it is no worse than that of the film’s other actors. The exaggerated acting was intentional. Russell must have wanted that alienation effect, so that you see Valentino as more of a cipher – a projection of other people’s sexual hang-ups and power games. I look at Valentino especially as a movie in the Ben Hecht style, particularly Hecht’s Specter of the Rose. That too was about the misguided and often-psychopathic worship of “art.” Everyone’s overacting and coming across as miscast, but that’s all the more fitting for themes about hambones aspiring to be idols of the stage and screen. Russell is best when he works in that heightened reality. I commend that lack of “polish” that makes his best movie moments as clumsy yet as inspiring as an Isadora Duncan dance. Few directors are that brave."

MR: Films like Tommy, Valentino, Lair of the White Worm and Altered States got a lot of press upon their initial theatrical release. Do you feel like these films, and Russell's films in general, have held up well?



JL: "Lousy dialogue and a gauche happy ending hamper Altered States. But Tommy looks intriguing, especially in the way that it had set the trend for the MTV-style video. There have been pop video precursors, such as Scopitones, but Russell, as far back as his parody of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” in The Music Lovers, helped to inspire MTV’s more cinematic entries. And I think Valentino holds up quite well. It certainly has a seventies feeling to it (Art Nouveau enjoyed a revival back then), but I think it could find a new, appreciative audience today that would get the irony."

MR: Do you see Russell's influence in any films and/or filmmakers at present?


JL: "There are smatterings of Russell’s style here and there, but there’s not enough of a conscious homage to his influence. The best I’ve seen is the 2006 film Brothers of the Head. The directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe not only pay tribute to Russell’s impressionist documentary style; they also include Russell himself commenting on the movie’s imaginary film-within-a-film. I wish they’d included more footage that shows up on the DVD extras, with Russell giving his ideas about how subjective truth is often truer than “the facts.” He would have made a grand contrast to the character in the film who plays the self-righteous “cinema verite” director -- the one who rambles on and on about being “real,” yet seems so phony.

MR: Whose idea was it to title the book Phallic Frenzy?

JL "I am happy and proud to say that I thought up that title. My publisher also let me choose the cover image. That probably doesn’t happen often."

See more about he book at
www.ipgbook.com
or
www.chicagoreviewpress.com

David Cronenberg and the literary influences of his horror work...

Interview: Author Mark Browning's new book connects the dots of David Cronenberg's literary influences...



For more than thirty years, David Cronenberg has made independent films such as Scanners and A History of Violence which aim to provoke, surprise, and challenge audiences. In his work, he has drawn themes, inspiration and source material from a number of authors (J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Patrick McGrath) whose themes connect readily with Cronenberg's. Author and film scholar Dr. Mark Browning's new work David Cronenberg: Author or Filmmaker?(Intellect) is a work that attempts to illuminate and unravel the connection between the great Canadian auteur and his literary influences. Dr. Browning was good enough to speak to FSW about his work and the cinema of Cronenberg.


FSW: You mention that most, if not all of Cronenberg's works are based on a literary source-Do you think this is intentional on his part and do you think this approach suits his gifts as a filmmaker?


MB: "Very much so. The scope of the book focuses on the period from Videodrome up to the response to Crash- a film, which I believe over time will come to be seen as one of the most significant for a generation. Literature forms part of Cronenberg`s life-blood- in interviews he talks fluently and in detail about the content of books, not just their titles and mentions critics knowledgeably too. Critics who formed their view of his work in the late seventies assumed that the films he was making then was all he could do but post-Videodrome it is literature, not disease which sits at the core of his aesthetic approach



"I should say here that the book had quite a troubled gestation period. There is, in some circles, as sense that there is a fair amount of Cronenberg scholarship but actually that is only partially true. There are essays and collections of essays but my book is only the second single-authored study on Cronenberg in English and if it had been piublished when I first submitted it, it might have been the first. Two publishing houses, who shall remain nameless, shelved the project on two different occasions due to entirely predictable reasons of internal politics completely unrelated to the book, which was frustrating to say the least."

FSW: Do you see Cronenberg's career divided up in a particular way?

MB: "Yes and no. As Cronenberg himself has said, his films do read like chapters in a single book but I would place Videodrome as a pivotal work. It shows him working through issues of what the film medium can do, which makes the film still resonate 25 years later."

FSW: You mention the influence (or at least acknowledgement) of the culture of pornography in Cronenberg's work (Videodrome and Crash are two of the more obvous examples you cite)-Do you think that Cronenberg's attitude toward this is consistent or mixed? Do you see this theme in his more current


MB: "I don`t think that Cronenberg is fascinated by porn per se, although as I mention in the book, it gave him a way into film-making, it´s more that he is fascinated by the apparently polar opposites of masochism and sadism, which commonly find their cultural expression in pornography. I think it`s worth noting too that in the evolution of the moving image, pornography has played a central and continuing role and anyone who wants to make films about how human sexuality might evolve (one of Cronenberg`s key concerns) cannot avoid considering this."

FSW: There is a fair amount of Cronenberg scholarship (such as The Modern Fantastic)-Besides your approach to Cronenberg's work as grounded in a literary tradition do you think you have unearthed any other interesting themes in his work?

MB: "Unearthing themes is not really what the book`s about and I am quite adamant about that. Far too much supposed analysis of films makes generalised comment without considering specific scenes and shots in actual films themselves with the result that completely different readings can be taken from the same film without any sense that one has more validity than the other. Suffice to say, film comment that designates a representative status to character actions, bugs the hell out of me. As does psycho-analysis but that`s another question."

"The approach to Cronenberg via literature is not just one more thing he`s interested in- it permeates almost everything he does. That said, there are probably PhDs yet to be written about Cronenberg & painting, his Canadianness (especially linked to other filmmakers like Atom Egoyan)- essays have touched on this but not far really, his directorial method on set & Cronenberg and philosophy (especially Schopenhauer)."

FSW: Do you think any of Cronenberg's work has elements
of traditional Hollywood filmmaking?

MB: "All of it does. Apart from generating finance and using large studios (which he has also done on occasion). He uses stars, he markets his films as part of the conventional publicity machine, he gives countless interviews and most importantly, in terms of his technique, there is little that breaks conventional codes of filmmaking. What makes his films different is the uses to which these are put. For example in eXistenZ, you have plenty of shot-reverse/shot editing but often what a character is apparently looking at is not there, i.e. virtual reality sequences are unsignalled by a wobbly or blurry screen or helpful voiceover. Similarly, many of his films open with a forward tracking shot- plenty of films do- but his often go further. We wait for a cut that does not come and the camera appears to be wandering around looking for a subject (think of the opening of Spider or Crash or more recently A History of Violence). We are not spoonfed what part of the image to look at or what the relationship between shots could/should be- there`s no voiceover (removed from the original script of both Crash and Spider) to give us a moral compass- we`re on our own."


FSW: Do you place any significance on Croneneberg's acting career?


MB: "Not much. I did like his character in To Die For but that is a really interesting film all round. He tends to choose the sinister figures of authority that interviewers expect when they meet him so you could say he is playing with audience expectations of his persona. He`s not Hitchcock, going for a nod and a wink as part of a cinematic “Spot the Dog” game with his die-hard fans. That is closer to Stephen King, who has appeared in numerous films for that tongue-in-cheek element of self-referentiality (this is fresh in my mind as I am currently working through all 70+ films based on his work)."

FSW: Do you see the influence of certain filmmakers in Cronenberg's work?

MB: "This is one of the perennial frustrations about reading interviews with Cronenberg. Not only has he got carefully-worded repsonses to any question you care to give, he has evaded the notion of influence for years. He will admit admiring Fellini and Bergman for example but will claim that like all artists he absorbs their influences and then creates something holly original. My book suggests the reality is slightly different but its focus is literary. A superb PhD thesis suggestion would be Cronenberg and the European art film, which I think has influenced him quite strongly, most particularly in the concept of the auteur, which he seems to buy into completely without question. It was only (and finally) in interviews about Spider in 2003 that he began to accept the influence of Carol Reed on the visual look of the film but even here he would always nervously switch the conversation to Beckett or Pinter."

FSW: How do you see Cronenberg's career evolving withhis most recent work Eastern Promises? Do you detect growth? new themes? new outlooks?

MB: "Hard to answer this one as I haven`t seen Eastern Promises yet but greatly looking forward to it. It might suggest an enduring fondness for London (after the experience of Spider) and working with specific actors (Viggo Mortenson, after A History of Violence). As for the future, there is an off-on self-scripted project called Painkillers, which looks back to Videodrome but I suspect that Cronenberg`s future projects may involve Martin Amis` London Fields- with its shifting sexual identities and an author who is an avowed fan of Nabokov, I would say it´s a strong contender but I would also say that one of the great attractions of going to see a Cronenberg movie is that you never really know what you`re going to get."