Eraserhead, and a few more films

Entr'acte (1924)
Streaming free at Internet Archive

Was this the birth of avant garde cinema? Probably not, but it's the first film directed by René Clair, it's 22 minutes, and it's remarkable.

My vocabulary of art-words is limited, so maybe it's surrealism, or possibly dada? Clair uses every trick of photography, not to tell a story — none of that here — but just to keep things popping and interesting.

There's a wild ride on a wooden roller coaster, and a big crowd of overdressed people slow-motion silly-walking and then silly-running after a hearse. A ballet is danced on glass, with the camera underneath, so it's the invention of the upskirt, and then the camera pulls back and we can see that the dancer is a man with a beard. And as they say in the infomercials, much, much more.

This would be well worth watching, even if it was new. That it's a hundred years old makes it history, but more importantly, it's still well worth watching.

NEVERENDING
FILM FESTIVAL
#261  [archive]
MAR. 16, 2024

And hey, the musical score is by my man Erik Satie, his only original work created for the cinema.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦  

Equinox (1969)
Streaming free at YouTube

The opening is classy but nicely unsettling, with eerie music and imagery of clockworks. It got my hopes up that the movie might be something special. Soon as the movie gets underway, though, it's clearly a very amateur effort. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Four college students are called to a meeting with their professor at his home, but when they get there the home has been demolished. There's suddenly a castle across the valley, where there'd been no castle the day before, so they decide the professor must he in the castle, and make their way toward it. But first, they stop in a cave, where a laughing madman gives them a mysterious book that smells like rotten eggs.

As a sci-fi effort, this is an un-assembled jigsaw puzzle. There's the potential for a decent story, but the script is clumsy, and the acting is — well, they tried.

There aren't many effects, but they're definitely better than the film deserves, including some brief stop-motion, matte paintings, mixed exposures, and monster costumes. It got me curious enough to check, and the effects are credited to three men — David Allen, who went on to a career of schlock movie effects, Jim Danforth, who worked on They Live and Supertrain, and Dennis Muren, who followed this with an A-list career of effects work on flicks like Jurassic Park, The Abyss, Terminator 2, and the sucky Star Wars sequels. 

Some other crazy credits — sci-fi author Fritz Leiber (Our Lady of Darkness, The Wanderer) plays the professor. Frank Bonner, who played Herb on WKRP in Cincinnati, plays one of the four students, quite badly. Sci-fi superfan Forrest J Ackerman (Famous Monsters of Filmland) is the voice on the tape recorder. Ed Begley Jr is credited as assistant cameraman.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Eraserhead (1977)
Streaming free at Internet Archive

"14 years ago I had an operation on my left arm here. The doctors said that I wouldn't be able to ever use it. But what the hell do they know, I said, so I rubbed it for a half hour every day, and slowly I could move it a little, and use it to turn a faucet. Pretty soon, I had my arm back again, and now I can't feel a damn thing in it. All numb!"

This is David Lynch's first feature film, and it was the wildest movie I'd ever seen, when I first saw it, circa 1980. Eraserhead made me a huge fan of strange movies.

Lynch went on to make The Elephant Man, a pretty good Dune, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, etc. And sure, Lynch has fallen short with some of his more recent work, but Eraserhead still amazes.

It's a vivid black-and-white nightmare, filmed on location inside Mr Lynch's mind. No further summary could do it justice, and I'll offer no airy philosopharting about what it means, but if you've seen Eraserhead you remember it, and if you haven't seen it you should.

"In Heaven, everything is fine. In Heaven, everything is fine. In Heaven, everything is fine. You've got your good things, and I've got mine."

In the closing credits, numerous people are given "special thanks," and one of them is Sissy Spacek. For decades I've wondered about that, and thought it was likely a joke. Now it can be told, because Lynch has explained: Eraserhead was mostly made with a grant from the American Film Institute, but when the money ran out, Spacek and her husband (of now 50 years), production designer Jack Fisk, were among the people who put up some needed funds to get the film finished.

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Before pressing 'play', there was some skepticism. I enjoyed most of Steven Spielberg's early work — Duel, Jaws, Raiders, and especially Close Encounters — but E.T. left me cold when I saw it in '82. It's like Nolan Ryan in his prime tossing horseshoes instead of fastballs. Leaving the theater, my thought was, "That wasn't much."

Yet this was Spielberg's hugest hit, and "a cultural phenomenon," as idiots say. All through the summer of '82, people would not shut up about it. My mother, who only sees Christian movies, went to see E.T. and told me she loved it. My girlfriend wanted to see it, so I sat through it a second time, grumbling — and she adored it. Everyone adored it. 

Over the decades since, several people have told me it's their favorite 'science fiction', and I cringe. Neil Diamond, Carole Bayer Sager, and Burt Bacharach wrote a schmaltzy pop hit about E.T. — and the studio sued them over it. At the box office, this piece of cotton candy passed Star Wars as the biggest money-making movie of all time.

Flash forward to 2024, and a coupla weeks ago, my brother brought his grandson to our bi-weekly breakfast. The kid's 7 years old, cute, unvaccinated because his mother's insane, and he said he'd just seen E.T., "and it was sooo great! Did you see it?"

"Nope, never saw it," I lied.

"Well, you gotta," he explained, and went on and on about it, so now I gotta. Maybe I'll eat my words after I've finally learned to love the long-fingered glow-in-the-dark cuddly space alien, so here goes...

—PLAY—

… Oh, jeez, that was worse than I'd remembered. The cuddly space alien is all big-eyed and cloying, and every frame of the film and every noise on the soundtrack is calculated to make you say, Awww. Every outside shot looks like a foggy Van Gogh, and there's always a dog barking way off in the distance. Soon as Henry Thomas turns on the sink to wash dishes, a yard-wide wall of steam rises up photogenically. The music matches the movie's dullness and stickiness, and it's the worst score John Williams ever wrote. And there's more product placement than in a grocery store: Reese's Pieces, Coca-Cola, Pez, Yoplait, Skippy, Coors, V-8… and that's just in the first half of this, before I clicked it off.

Watching E.T. made me impatient, restless, grumpy, and a little nauseous. It's Spielberg at his most saccharine-syrupy.

I am unemployed, and have nothing better to do than watch old movies, but there are ten thousand better old movies to watch. I will never understand why so many million frickin' adults were rhapsodied by this gloopy mess.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦  

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Soul (2004)

Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) meet impossibly cute, have an affair, move in together, and then break up. It's a painful split, so Clementine hires a service to have her memory wiped — she'll never be able to remember Joel, and that's what she wants. Hearing about this breaks Joel's already broken heart, so he goes to the same company to have his memories of Clementine removed.

Unless it was supposed to be symbolic of something, the company's methodology for these memory wipes is troubling. Joel goes home with the memory-wipe technician, spends the night in a coma on his couch, while the technician gets high and gets fucked, and tells friends about Joel's memories while he's deleting them? HIPAA rules should apply, please.

Winslet, especially at the movie's start, is an impossibly manic pixie dream girl, but her character and performance gets better as the movie goes along. Carrey is quite good in his first strictly dramatic role, and the visual crumbling of his memories is presented beautifully. As the technician, Mark Ruffalo is too much the nerd stereotype, with ruffled hair and glasses. Kirsten Dunst, as often happens, plays a pretty plot device.

Charlie Kaufman wrote the script, and he wrote Being John Malkovich, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Synecdoche, New York, so this has to be good, right? But he also wrote the insufferable Human Nature, so his name is not a guarantee.

If you're still in love with an ex who's dumped you and then erased you, would you erase your ex from your mind in retaliation? Not me. I'd go to the grocery store where she shops, 'bump into her' again as a stranger, and start all over.

That said, the movie's ending is damned near perfect, and watching Eternal Sunshine several years ago, it struck me as profound, a beautiful romance that ends ugly, followed by a smidgen of well worked-out science fiction.

Watching it again tonight, a scent of hooey filled the air, and the movie only sporadically held my interest. Was I right a few years ago, loving it, or right tonight, scowling and shaking my head? Honestly, I don't know.

The first time I saw this I was happily married. Now I'm a widower who's alone about 340 days a year. It's the same movie, and I'm what's changed, so I'm recusing myself from deciding whether it's as good as it probably is.

Verdict: UNDECIDED.

♦ ♦ ♦  

An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn (2017)

This is a weird movie, full of weird characters acting weirdly. It's never genuine weird, though — meaning, it's not about weird characters who could exist, like you and me and the people I see on the bus.

Nah, this is stuffed with the much easier but less interesting kind of 'weird', where the writers toss random 'weird' at the script, and the director instructs everyone to be sure their performances are weird, too.

Aubrey Plaza stars, with Maria Bamford, Jemaine Clement, Emile Hirsch, and Craig Robinson. Robinson's dialogue is largely confined to grunts, Hirsch impersonates Jack Black, and everyone in the cast has at least one weirdness going on.

The elusive plot has Not Jack Black stealing money from his brother-in-law, so his brother-in-law keeps popping up to demand his money back. Aubrey is fooling around with Clement, and eager to see grunting Robinson's night club act as 'Beverly Luff Linn'.

The most enjoyable moments are an argument over whether 'Beverly' is a man's or a woman's name, some ridiculous dancing in a night club, and a hairy fat guy fucking another fat guy in the arse. 

Ms Plaza is always good on screen, and she's the most interesting thing here, but unfortunately it's an ensemble show, and everyone else in the cast flails.

In the closing credits, 13 corporate logos float by after the cast. First time I can remember seeing such a large flock of logos after a movie, and I usually do watch the credits. 

Verdict: NO.

 3/16/2024  

• • • Coming attractions • • •     

Eve's Bayou (1997)
Ex Machina (2014)
Exam (2009)
Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)
Exotica (1994)
Extract (2009)

... plus schlock, shorts, and surprises

There are so many good movies out there — old movies, odd or artsy, foreign or forgotten movies, or do-it-yourself movies made just for the joy of making them — that if you only watch whatever's on Netflix or playing at the twenty-plex, you're missing out.

To get beyond the ordinary, I recommend:

Alter • Cineverse • Criterion • CultCinema Classics • DocsVille • Dust • Fandor • Films for Action • Hoopla • IHaveNoTV • IndieFlix • Internet Archive • Kanopy • KinoCult • Kino Lorber • Korean Classic Film • Christopher R Mihm • Mosfilm • Mubi • National Film Board of Canada • New Yorker Screening Room • Damon Packard • Mark Pirro • PizzaFlix • PopcornFlix • Public Domain Movies • RareFilmm • Scarecrow Video • Shudder • ThoughtMaybe • Timeless Classic Movies • VoleFlix • WatchDocumentaries • or your local library. 

Some people even access films through shady methods, though of course, that would be wrong.

— — —

Illustration by Jeff Meyer. Reviews are spoiler-free, or at least spoiler-warned. Click any image to enlarge. Arguments & recommendations are welcome, but no talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff. 

 

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