Black Lamb

Invaders R Us

September 1st, 2003

BY GENE RYDER

You’re an eight-year-old boy. People are disappearing in the field out behind your house, only to return next day with a red scar on their neck and a cold stare in their eyes. First your father gets it, then two of his friends that go searching for him, and then your mother, too. Even the sheriff will go out to the sand pit to investigate and come back with the red mark and the cold stare.

At first, you try to tell others about this, to warn them, only every one of them gives you a look like it’s all in your head. As for your parents (what’s left of them anyway) they give you half a glass of milk, then tell you to go to bed and quit worrying about it, that everything will be better soon. In their mouths, “soon” sounds like an evil adverb.

“But I really did see a white ball of light fall into the field behind the house,” you tell them as you climb the stairs. “Maybe even a spaceship. I swear, it landed out near the sandpit, just beyond the back fence.”

They smile knowingly, but there’s a wicked conspiracy behind the smile, and you begin to suspect that adults have just been one big conspiracy from the start, spaceship or no spaceship.

The last thing you hear before you go to sleep is a cow bellowing out near the sandpit. And then it stops suddenly, and you know its ass is now grass, too.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Ryder, All Movie Issue, Movies | Link to this Entry

Roads to rebellion

September 1st, 2003

BY DAVID MACLAINE

When I jot down the names of films that move me deeply despite their absence from Greatest Films lists, I can see at a glance what they have in common. Holiday, Auntie Mame, A Thousand Clowns, The Horse’s Mouth, hell, even Harvey and Woodstock and The Rocky Horror Picture Show: all share some version of the theme that non-conformity is the road to bliss.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Maclaine, All Movie Issue, Movies | Link to this Entry

How I became an artist

September 1st, 2003

BY CLINTON WILSON

Living in Prague a few years ago having only a rudimentary grasp of the Czech language, I was faced with the constant challenge of finding a film that didn’t require the reading of daunting Czech subtitles. This often left me with the dismal choice of mainstream American films that monopolized the cinemas of Prague. When the blockbuster Titanic opened during an usually severe famine of engaging film, I grudgingly paid to see it, but not before reconsidering and retreating from the box office queue three times. So when a festival of Peter Greenaway opened in the city, I coerced my German boyfriend to see an early work, one of the few films on the program alien to me.

I had become a fervent Peter Greenaway fan upon my initial introduction in college to his commercially successful cult favorite, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. After seeing many of the auteur’s ambitious projects — Prospero’s Books, Zed and Two Naughts, and his numerological masterpiece Drowning By Numbers — I marveled at his power to elevate the bizarre and the grotesque. But these films barely prepared me for his modest 1976 effort, Vertical Features Remake.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Wilson, All Movie Issue, Movies | Link to this Entry

One balmy night

September 1st, 2003

BY JOEL HESS

The Towering Inferno changed my life. No, really.

Not that it was a particularly spectacular flick. It was entertaining, certainly, but no one would place it on any list of the greatest movies of all time. Even as an example of the disaster movie genre, it’s probably not much more than mediocre. (My vote for the best movie of that ilk goes to 1936’s San Francisco; drawn into the story and the characters’ relationships, you forget that it’s a disaster movie until almost the end, when the earthquake finally hits with sudden, startling fury. Who needs state-of-the-art special effects?)

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Category: Hess, All Movie Issue, Movies | Link to this Entry

Behind that curtain

September 1st, 2003

BY CAROL WOLFE

Dear Carol,

Although I am a great fan of cinema, I find that I can no longer go to the movies. I am totally fed up with the constant barrage of sex and the nonstop assault of four-letter words that seem to have replaced plot, adventure and romance. Yes, I may be an old fuddy duddy, but I yearn for the days when we could count on the movie industry to provide us with wholesome entertainment. My favorite film of all time remains The Wizard of Oz. I recently read somewhere that the making of the movie did not go smoothly. What type of controversy could possibly attend this charming piece of work?

Priscilla H.
Lewiston, Maine

Dear Priscilla,

The making of The Wizard of Oz was attended by one of the most bitter labor disputes of its time. The year was 1937. On February 26, Dennis Nunzio and thirty-five midget singers in the cast walked off the MGM stage in a joint work stoppage over issues of unequal pay, harassment and poor working conditions. Unrest began after Munchkin “villager” Chip Gimple asked Judy Garland if she wouldn’t like to get together for a drink after the day’s shoot, to which the child actress allegedly responded, “Yeah, Chippy? My tree stump or yours ?” ( Just two weeks earlier, she had told him it was too bad he wasn’t tall enough to play the part of Toto). Gimble was kicked off the set after telling Garland that perhaps the secret to escaping Oz might be to “stop putting so many Phenobarbs on your cereal every morning.”

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Wolfe, All Movie Issue, Movies | Link to this Entry