Hugh Millais

One of the side effects of seeing too many movies is that you can end up feeling a mysteriously strong attachment to certain people who you not only never met, but whose earthly existence would still be unknown to you if they hadn’t happened to have performed just the right services once on just the right film set. So it was, for me, with Hugh Millais, who was in his early forties when he made his acting debut, in Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, as Dog Butler, the professional killer who works for a big mining company, trudging through the snowy woods to dispatch people who have proven inconvenient to the men in a distant boardroom. He was one of those people who Altman noticed somewhere–in his case, a bar–and invited to join the cast of whatever movie he was working on, out of some instinct that he had something to bring to the party. With Millais, the real trick would have been to step into whatever room where he was part of the crowd and not notice him; he stood six foot seven and, in the movie, arrives in town toting an elephant gun and wearing a walrus mustache and a coat that looks as if he’d skinned a yeti. Talking to Dick Cavett in 1971, Altman said of Millais that he was “a sort of a con man anyway, so he’s been acting all his life.”

Review: Funny People

Although it seems like there’s a new Judd Apatow movie every other weekend, Funny People is the comedy mogul’s first effort as a writer/director in the two years since the release of Knocked Up. “Effort” is the key word here, as this ambitious two-and-a-half hour comedy-drama finds Apatow stretching creatively — and showing a bit of strain along the way.

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Unwatchable #30: Alien from L.A.

Your fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Back at the former home of Unwatchable, the late, lamented Screengrab, the venerable Leonard Pierce was moved to pen a tribute to Albert Pyun, perhaps our most underrated terrible director. “Both in his ridiculously prolific output and his utter lack of talent and shame, Albert Pyun leaves Uwe Boll in the dust,” Pierce boldly proclaimed. Urban Menace, Brain Smasher…A Love Story and Captain America were among the Pyun titles cited by my esteemed colleague, but somehow this early effort got off without so much as a warning. The time has come to correct this egregious oversight.

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Andrew Osborne’s Brush With Greatness #6: Funny People Edition

One man’s continuing effort to catalogue every famous person he’s ever encountered.

CE1K:  So, this past weekend, I was down in Nuevo York for my brother-in-law’s birthday (and to check out the most excellent Broadway revival of West Side Story) when at one point (during a Speed Levitchy open-air bus tour of lower Manhattan), I spy a ripped, bare-chested black guy chatting up a voluptuous soul sister from the cockpit of a vaguely familiar bright yellow Lamborghini convertible. “Hey! That’s Tracy Morgan!” one of the tourists behind me exclaims. (Or, as my brother-in-law wanted to know, was it really Tracy Jordan?)

Loopy

Ever since it played at Sundance last winter, I’ve been looking forward to Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop at least as eagerly as any new movie I’ve seen this year. That should probably be kept in mind when I say that I ended up being a little disappointed with it. In the Loop marks Iannucci’s debut as a movie director, but he’s already well established as a writer, producer, and director in British TV, especially for his role in the creation of the character Alan Partridge, the cretinous TV host played by Steve Coogan, and The Thick of It, starring Peter Capaldi as a political spin expert named Malcolm Tucker who works for the British prime minister. In the Loop is a spin-off that deals with Tucker’s role in shaping public opinion and cooking intelligence during the lead-up to the Iraq War. (It also features a subplot involving Coogan, unrecognizable in heavy disguise, as an angry constituent.) In the Loop features a remarkable cast of comic heavy hitters, some of whom (such as James Gandolfini as a Colin Powell-like general who tries to short-circuit the march to war but who backtracks on his promise to resign if he fails, citing his responsibility to his “boys”) don’t get the chance to play real comedy often enough, and many of whom don’t have the high profiles that their talent deserves. (That includes Mimi Kennedy as a diplomat who’s the most prominent anti-war voice in the room and David Rasche as a Rumsfeld clone named Linton Barwick; for American audience, at least, it also includes Capaldi, probably best known here as Peter Reigert’s lovestruck sidekick in Local Hero back in 1983.) The movie is expertly performed and parts of it are pretty funny; I enjoyed a lot of it and wouldn’t discourage anyone from seeing it. But the uniformly slavering critical notices have painted it as an audacious, explosively funny political satire on a par with Dr. Strangelove, and to me it looked more like–well, an extended version of a TV show that satirizes the headline events of seven years ago. (The movie is also being acclaimed for the unprecedented inventiveness of its characters’ profanity, and I also thought it was a little disappointing, after all the buildup, in that area as well–but then, I’m a Larry Sanders Show fanatic who was weaned on Richard Pryor records.)

15 Books and Skip Gates, Too!

So, my fellow Exiler Leonard Pierce sent me one of those damn Facebook lists I usually skip (because, like Grand Theft Auto and blogging, they’re a slippery slope down the temporal rabbit hole).

But Leonard’s rules were merely to list “fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.”

Naturally, I labored over my list for two hours and so, given the investment of time, I figured I might as well post it here for posterity.

Before I do, though, here’s my two cents on the current controversy brewing down yonder in Harvard Square…

First, Sgt. Crowley:  Really?  You couldn’t just say, “Sir, I’m only doing my job.  If you have a complaint, please contact the Cambridge Police Department.  Good afternoon.” 

Yeah, yeah, I understand that cops don’t always know what they’re up against, and so we, the public, should be calm, helpful and polite when dealing with the authorities, at least until the situation clarifies itself.  But why, after that point, do innocent people always have to kiss cop ass (or risk getting punished for NOT kissing cop ass)?  We DON’T have to kiss fireman ass throughout our lives despite the dangers THEY face, which is probably why nobody writes mean rap songs about them.

Acid Flashbacks

There’s a time-honored tradition in the arts, but maybe especially in film criticism, of sifting through underappreciated works from the past and subjecting them to “re-evaluation”, in hopes of turning up some misunderstood classics. Movie geeks are brought up on inspiring stories of how the French critics who went on to form the New Wave and other auteurists rewrote the classic film pantheon, and it’s only natural that younger writers want to have a similar impact on behalf of their favorites, especially since the insane overflow of writing about movies on the Internet instills in one a longing to stand out and prove the special value of one’s worth by breaking some wild new opinion that override decades of canon law. I get all this. I have my own share of noncanonical opinions that I’d love to slip into the record. (Spielberg’s 1941 rocks!) Sometimes, though, when I’m watching Richard Fleischer being redefined as a master one revival at a time (Violent Saturday, 10 Rillington Place) or hearing that Peter Bogdanovich’s Nickelodeon (which isn’t even the best of his really bad movies) has been revealed as a lost masterpiece by a new DVD that recasts it in black and white, I can’t help wondering if the re-evaluation track hasn’t jumped the tracks more than a time or two. With so many people making sweaty claims for everything this side of Howard the Duck in terms of sheer screaming awfulness, maybe what’s most needed now, maybe what’s even most radical, is sometimes to say that everybody really did get it right the first time.

At least, that’s how I felt after seeing Dennis Lim’s take on Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 belly flop Zabriskie Point. It’s easy to understand the desire to make a case for this much-derided film, at least in theory; certainly no sensible case could be made on the grounds of the movie itself, which left a sizable crater when it landed and which remains the only film made in the U.S. by the late director. It seems a shame that he came here for nothing, that he wasted not only his time but that of his hip collaborators (notably Sam Shepard, Clare Peploe, and Antonioni’s frequent screenwriter Tonino Guerra, who all worked on the script, as well as Jerry Garcia, John Fahey, Pink Floyd, and others who contributed music to the soundtrack), and that such a visually lush movie could be so unmoving, simple-minded and inert. It is a gorgeous-looking picture, no question about it, and like its leads, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, a testament to the fact that it is possible to be very beautiful and seem very stupid, with the end result of being very, very dull.

Leonard Pierce Interviews Grant Morrison

Scottish-born Grant Morrison started out working in British indie comics, and became part of the “Brit Wave” of UK writers who brought a sophisticated new perspective to American superhero comics beginning in the mid-’80s. Morrison’s American breakthrough came with the 1989 bestseller Arkham Asylum, which he followed up with his metafictional take on Animal Man and an ambitious, strange vision for the venerable Doom Patrol. Since then, Morrison has created The Invisibles, one of the defining comics of the ’90s; revamped the X-Men; and most recently, become the backbone of DC Comics, blending postmodern sensibilities and narrative techniques with an affectionate, informed respect for traditional superhero stories. Among his recent works are groundbreaking series like All-Star Superman, Seaguy, Seven Soldiers, Final Crisis, and We3, and he’s currently beginning a run with fellow Scot Frank Quitely on Batman And Robin. Morrison recently exchanged e-mails with The A.V. Club in a discussion of fandom, burnout, and Harry Potter rituals.

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Leonard Pierce’s Wasted Words

Hello, everyone! Did you know that there is a new episode of Wasted Words, the world’s finest drunken podcast, and that I am a guest panelist? Well, it’s all true!

Won’t you bend an ear and give a listen? You’ll learn:

- What bartenders think Heaven looks like

- How Shek Baker broke his arm

- To what degree I am obsessed with obscure rhetorical figures

And so much more!  Tune in today.

Alice Cooper Fun Facts!

It’s Sunday morning here in Somerville, which means it’s time once again for ALICE COOPER FUN FACTS!

#1. “Why Must I Be Sad?” by They Might Be Giants references 13 Alice Cooper songs.

#2. Alice Cooper is one of the few men in history to have both dated Racquel Welch AND decapitated a fake hairy cyclops.

#3. Salvador Dali once created a hologram of Alice Cooper’s brain.