Signal Maintenance: Headed for Indiana

not that Indiana

For work related reasons I am flying out Sunday morning for Indianapolis, Indiana.  I know!  One year it's Prince Edward Island, Canada and another it's Helsinki (it was, trust me), and the next, I'm off to the American mid-west for...  whatever happens in Indiana.

This conference tends to be pretty action-packed and can be social.  The Americans pretend we care what the Europeans are doing, and the Europeans acknowledge, partially, that the Americans are in the room.  Coffee will be consumed.  Then booze.  I'm just being honest.

So, the only movies I'm likely to see will be on cable in my room, but I have a few books I threw in my bag and I'm ready to go.  Not so sure about the posting.  Sometimes I spend a lot of time in my room, sometimes I only get a chance to walk in the door and flop.  We'll see which one this is.

At the end of the week I have a side-trip planned.  But I'll report out on that as events warrant.

Signal Re-Watch: Mad Max - Fury Road

Man that is one hell of a movie.

I can't tell you how pleased I was to watch this movie a second time and see things I hadn't seen before.  Dialog, character beats, things like that.  Always the mark of a good movie.

There's not all that much to mention other than that on a second go-round I got to enjoy more of what was going on in the movie and not just desperately hang on with both hands and try to keep up.  But everything you've been reading about the old-school expertise filmmaking in a 2015-era film is right, right down to the use of "fade to black" as transitions between acts.  And, really, no mainstream movie has done more to show rather than tell in years.

And you can't really say enough about George Miller's sense of world building.  If anything fell apart in the 1980's cheap post-apocalyptic knock-offs, it was pretty much every single detail, but it started at the lack of thought put into the world - what was it like living in a world where the grid had fallen apart?  Everything is built with motivation in mind, and not all of that motivation says much good about humanity.  But it drives everything from vehicle design to the mythologies and modes of survival.  It's what some of the best movies do on screen, sci-fi or otherwise, and Miller has been living in this world a long, long time.

Anyway, likely I'll watch this one again and again for some time to come.

Cap Watch: Captain America (1990)

Some time in 1989, with the success of Tim Burton's Batman now making the idea of superhero movies an attractive financial reality, I remember walking out of a movie and into the lobby of a local theater here in sunny Austin, Texas (Great Hills 8 then, The Arbor 8 now), and seeing the poster below:

While I was aware this was Marvel running to catch up with their own non-flying, non-laser slinging superhero, I was also pretty jazzed.  Captain America seemed pretty attainable as far as superheroes went.  I had vague memories of the 1979 movies, I'd been reading a little Cap here and there, and I really wanted to see someone smack bad guys with that shield.

Then, Spring and summer 1990 came and went, and no Cap movie materialized.  I was a bit of a showbiz follower, and I knew what it meant when a movie was delayed or shelved (it rarely meant they were holding onto the movie because they just forgot to release it).

Flash-forward to on evening after June 2002.  I had moved to Phoenix and was already up a little late,when the TV told me they were going to air the 1990 Captain America movie.  Rather than just set the DVR and go to bed, I sat up with the movie until the bitter end.

The film was grainy and desaturated, and I remember that slow sinking feeling of despair setting in that was once so common when it came to portrayals of superheroes on TV or in movies.

Honestly, if you didn't try to watch everything with a superhero in it prior to Sam Raimi's Spider-Man and Singer's X-Men, you will never really understand what it was like to be grateful for anything with a superhero in it somewhere outside of comics.  And if you came into superheroes with the Avengers movies, you are living in a very magical time, indeed.

Because for a long time, it seemed like a point of pride for movie makers to take the source material of a comic book superhero and obliterate it in favor of whatever the director felt like doing.  Sometimes this worked - and both the Burton and Nolan Batman movies work as movies even if they're not exactly Dark Knight Detective movies.  Prior to that, I'll admit that Superman had completely ignored much of the comics in favor of doing their own thing, but they did keep core elements in place enough that they managed to make the movie clearly a Superman flick.  Even Wonder Woman, which you guys know I think is the bees knees, rarely featured super-bad-guys and never any of her established villains.  It just hung tight to being a good show with a solid lead character.  And, it's safe to say, Lynda Carter and Christopher Reeve's takes on the characters wound up deeply impacting the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths DCU.

Signal Watch Reads: Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (audiobook)

This isn't the first time I have read Red Harvest (1929) by noted crime and detective author Dashiell Hammett.  In fact, it was the first Hammett I ever read, but it was about fifteen years ago and over the course of a few plane rides, and after reading my fair share of Hammett since, I could only remember snippets here and there and the general plot and tone.  But with Hammett's birthday recently passed, I decided that was my cue to revisit the book.

It would seem this novel inspired a whole lot of other stuff from general tone to dialog to whole films, but to my knowledge it has never been translated into a movie of the same name with the same characters.  And it's just as likely the things the book inspired were, in turn, the inspiration for other works.  There are certainly similarities to the book in the Kurosawa movie Yojimbo (but Kurosawa states he was inspired by The Glass Key, a different Hammet book turned into a movie with similar themes - and the movie has Veronica Lake, natch), which in turn would have inspired A Fistful of Dollars and the mediocre as hell Last Man Standing.

I'd argue that the Coen Bros. were obviously nuts for Hammett, and Miller's Crossing is essentially a particularly strong blend and distillation of Red Harvest and The Glass Key, in everything from plot similarities to character archetypes to Hammett's very specific dialog and use of slang.  Further, the term "Blood Simple" is used more than once in the book, and is - not coincidentally - the title of their debut film.

Hammett had a favorite character, a detective who refused to name himself (cough... Man With No Name... cough) in his narratives.  The character appeared in what must have been dozens of short works published in magazines like Black Mask and which are known as The Continental Op stories.  A private detective employed by The Continental Detective Agency usually solves crimes around the Bay Area during the 1920's - the period during which Hammett was writing (and drinking, one assumes).

Movie Watch: Mud (2012)

This was a curious little movie.  It had name talent, everyone from Matthew McConaughey to Reese Witherspoon to Sam Shepard to Joe Don Baker, but aside from McConaughey, lots of folks took a back seat to the teen-aged actors at the forefront of the story and were in parts no bigger or smaller than actors you've not heard of before.

Storywise, Mud (2012) reminded me a lot of the indie features I used to catch at the Village Cinema in Austin back before it was converted into an Alamo Drafthouse and I was at the movies 2 times a week, minimum.  Set in rural-ish Arkansas, the movie follows a 14 year-old Ellis and his friend "Neckbone" (a name I shall be bestowing onto my nephew when the time is right), at that odd age between young childhood and before anyone is remotely close to treating you as an adult.  Ellis and Neckbone live in river country and head out to an island where they plan to claim a boat as a treefort as the boat has gotten stuck in some boughs during a recent flood.

Cap Watch: Captain America II - Death Too Soon!

This evening we took in the second, not lesser, but - indeed - final installment of the TV movie exploration of Marvel's Sentinel of Liberty, Captain America in Captain America II: Death Too Soon (1979).

The movie is perhaps even more of a curiosity than the prior attempt, but it's worth noting that Wonder Woman - which we sort of think of as fully formed, first aired as a TV movie with tennis-pro Cathy Lee Crosby as a jump-suited, blonde Wonder Woman prior to the decision to try another TV movie pilot with Lynda Carter, which led into the series (which had to switch networks and decades before the 1977 season, just to make life more complicated).

Things were a little different back when you had to actually be home to watch TV when it aired, and once it was gone, it was gone.

Cap DOES NOT let thugs take money from sweet old ladies.  No, really.

I genuinely feel this movie is better acted and directed than the origin story, and the plot plods along at a mosey instead of a painful death march.  I'm not saying this even good TV, but I am saying it didn't physically hurt to watch (even if I did end the movie with a migraine halo).

Cap Watch: Captain America (1979)

It's been a long time since I've seen this version of Captain America, but I am pretty sure that this was also my first real exposure to Ol' Wing Head.  What's weird is that I remember knowing who Cap was when I watched the movie, but I don't know why.  I didn't own any Captain America comics until 4th or fifth grade, so I guess I was watching those "throws his mighty shield" cartoons.

If I had to guess, this movie was intended as a bit of a pilot for a Captain America TV show, and the movie didn't get the eyeballs that they were hoping for.  This would have been after Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk were on TV, so there was recent precedent for making super-heroes work on TV in a dramatic context, as well as sci-fi concepts like The Bionic Woman/ Six Million Dollar Man franchises.  But, if I am going to pick nits, the primary difference between those shows and Captain America (1979) is that the Captain America movie is very, very not good.

The sins are many.  It nonsensically overcomplicates Cap's origin, strips it of any WWII-era ties, and goes all in on post-Watergate cynicism regarding patriotism while paradoxically insisting we "cram Captain America down their throats".

This is the part of the year in which I watch a reality show about dancing!

This is the part of the year during which, if I want to see my wife, I watch the Fox dancing competition "reality" program, So You Think You Can Dance?

Of the possible reality game shows she could have selected to watch, it's one of the more innocuous things I could deal with.  It's not dubious, karaoke-style singing a la American Idol.  And it's not about a panel of judges that I know nothing about, a la The Voice.  It doesn't make me hate humanity (see: any reality programming gameshow on MTV).  And it's not as relentlessly depressing as most dating or "unscripted" things that, for real, I cannot get my head around at all.

But I also know next to nothing about the art of dance.  If it didn't feature Madonna expressing herself circa 1989 or the ladies of En Vogue instructing me to "free my mind", I am not sure how much attention I paid to anyone dancing anywhere during my formative years.

I believe we are now in season 478 of So You Think You Can Dance? and I feel no closer to understanding dance any better.  I listen to the critiques, shrug, and have little to no opinion.

Birthday of Marilyn Monroe

Norma Jeane Mortenson, June 1, 1926

Musical Watch: On the Town (1949)

I've seen On the Town (1949) before, but it was years ago and I couldn't begin to guess the context other than that it was probably on cable and I had an evening to kill.

This one is years after the heyday of the Busby Berkeley spectaculars (42nd Street was 1933) and tilts much more toward what was coming in by 1952 with Singing in the Rain or even Oklahoma! (1955).  But the bright lights of New York itself are still the attraction as in so many of those musicals of the 1930's, and as a former Broadway show - produced at the tail-end of the second World War, the original show sits at a curious precipice between eras.  And, of course, they must have rewritten plenty of the show to accommodate the fact WWII was actually over by the time the movie went into production.

The plot:  three sailors disembark at Navy Yard in New York, New York for a 24 hour shore leave.  They intend to see the sites, maybe get some dates with some girls, etc... when Gabey (Gene Kelley) falls for the girl in a poster for "Miss Turnstiles", a dubious honorific bestowed upon girls looking for publicity for their career as a performer in NYC and a bit of shoddy publicity for the NY transit system.  And, of course, he meets Miss Turnstiles (Vera-Ellen) quite by accident, convincing his pals Chip (Frank Sinatra) and Ozzie (Jules Munshin) to help in pursuit after they lose track of her.

They meet an amorous cab driver (Betty Garrett) and a tap-dancing anthropologist (Ann Miller), and hi-jinks ensue.