Amazing Spider-Man 2 wasn’t the only trailer released this week. There was also the trailer for Nurse 3D, which appears to be a remake of The Roommate — except this time, they’re nurses, it’s in 3D, and the trailer’s broad hints of lesbian menace would seem to suggest that Nurse 3D comes from a parallel universe where Blue Is The Warmest Color was never made.
He’s back….
For today’s entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, we take a look at one of my favorites of the old school British horror films, 1970’s Scream and Scream Again.
Taking place in the near future, Scream and Scream Again follows three seemingly unconnected stories.
In the first — and, to me, the most disturbing — story, an unnamed London man collapses while out jogging. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a hospital. He is tended to by a nurse who refuses to speak to him. Whenever he falls asleep, his limbs are surgically removed one-by-one. While we never learn much about the man, his scenes are perhaps the most difficult to watch. Everything from the starkness of the hospital to the nurse’s lack of concern and empathy for her patient contributes towards making these some of the most genuinely nightmarish scenes that I’ve ever seen.
While the unnamed jogger is being slowly taken apart, the London police are far more interested in solving the “Vampire Killer” case. Keith (Michael Gothard) is a serial killer who picks up young women in nightclubs and then drinks their blood. When, after an exciting chase, the police finally do catch him, they attempt to handcuff Keith to a car bumper. Keith responds by ripping off his own hand and running into the night. The investigation into Keith eventually leads to an eminent scientist named Dr. Browning (Vincent Price). However, Fremont (Christopher Lee), the head of the British secret service, orders the police to drop the case because Browning is apparently doing very important work for the government.
Meanwhile, in an unnamed country in Eastern Europe, secret police officer Konratz (Marshall Jones) ruthlessly climbs his way to the top of the service by murdering his superiors (including Peter Cushing). When a British spy is captured in his country, Konratz contacts Fremont and offers to exchange the spy for all the information that Scotland Yard has gathered about the Vampire Killer case…
Perhaps the best way to describe Scream and Scream Again would be “joyfully chaotic.” The film’s three separate storylines do all come together during the final ten minutes and the film’s climax does make a lot more sense than it really has any right to but, up until that moment, a lot of the pleasure from Scream and Scream Again comes from seeing just how many different plots and subplots director Gordon Hessler can juggle in one film without losing the audience. Fortunately, Scream and Scream Again is a wonderfully entertaining horror/sci-fi/conspiracy hybrid, one that remains compulsively watchable despite the fact that it often doesn’t make much sense.
Of course, one of the main reasons to see Scream and Scream Again is because it features three icons of horror cinema. Unfortunately, Cushing isn’t on-screen long enough to make much of an impression while Lee basically just has an extended cameo. Vincent Price doesn’t show up until fairly late into the film but once he does, he wastes no time in making an impression. Even by the standard of Vincent Price, his performance in this film is a bit over-the-top.
But you know what?
It’s exactly the performance that this film needs. The film itself is so joyfully chaotic and disjointed that Price fits right in. The triumph of Scream and Scream Again is that it creates (and makes us believe in) a world where it only makes sense that the final solution would lie with Vincent Price.
Finally, Scream and Scream Again serves as a wonderful time capsule for those of us who may be fascinated by the swinging 60s and 70s but, as a result of being born a few decades too late, will never get a chance to experience them firsthand. For us, Scream and Scream Again will always be worth it for the scenes of Keith getting his mod on at a London discotheque.
Scream and Scream Again is a film that everyone should see at least once in their life. Just don’t go jogging afterwards…
Other Entries In The 44 Days of Paranoia
Today’s ghost of Christmas Past is the 1995 short film, The Spirit of Christmas: Jesus Vs. Santa. This is the short film that led to Comedy Central hiring Trey Parker and Matt Stone to develop the television series South Park. Needless to say, The Spirit of Christmas is not safe for work. It’s also not safe for the easily offended.
For today’s entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, I want to take a quick look at a very good movie from the year 2000 that not many seem to know about, Cheaters.
During my senior year of high school, I always wore a short skirt on any day that I had a test in my algebra class.
Why?
Because I was a cheater.
Back when I was still a student, I always struggled when it came to my math classes. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the work as much as it was that the work just bored me. Whenever my teacher was talking about square roots and x+y and all the rest, I was usually busy daydreaming about anything other than what I was supposed to be learning.
Fortunately, my sister Erin had been one year ahead of me in high school and had saved all of her old tests and quizzes. Since we both had the same algebra teacher, I started using her old tests as a study guide. It quickly became obvious that our teacher was simply reusing the same tests from year-to-year. While the order of the problems might occasionally change, the solutions remained the same.
Every test day, I would wear a skirt and, right before class, I would write the answers on my thigh. If the teacher walked by my desk while I was taking the test, I would just pull down on my skirt. Fortunately, the teacher was a male so even if he did suspect that I was cheating, it’s not like he could tell me to lift up my skirt or, for that matter, even get caught trying to look down at my legs.
And that’s how I managed to pass algebra without ever paying attention to anything that was said in class. I know that I should probably feel guilty about cheating but, to be honest, I don’t. If I had it to do all over again, I would do the exact same thing.
Perhaps that’s why I related to the character of Jolie Fitch in Cheaters.
Jolie (played by Jena Malone) is a junior at Chicago’s Steinmetz High. Jolie is one of the only students at Steinmetz to be more interested in academics than athletics. She also idolizes English teacher Jerry Plecki (Jeff Daniels). When Steinmetz’s buffoonish principal (Paul Sorvino) forces Jerry to take the unwanted job of coaching the school’s Academic Decathlon team, Jolie volunteers to help Plecki recruit an unlikely team of misfits and outsiders.
At the regional competition, the Steinmetz team just barely qualifies to move onto the state competition. However, no one on the team feels that they have a shot at beating the team from the far wealthier Whitney Young Magnet High School. As quickly becomes obvious, Whitney Young specifically goes out of their way to recruit the smartest students they can find and, as a result, they have won the state competition for five years straight.
Angered over the smugly elitist attitude of Whitney Young’s coach, Plecki obsessively pushes his team to study and prepare. However, with the state competition quickly approaching, the Steinmetz Team comes into possession of a copy of the test for the state finals. Obsessed with defeating Whitney Young, Plecki suggests that the students cheat. After being pressured by both Plecki and Jolie, the rest of the team agrees to do so.
When Steinmetz subsequently wins state, the Whitney Young coach immediately demands an investigation into how Steinmetz could have possibly made such a dramatic improvement in just the period of a few months.
However, the rest of Chicago is charmed by the story of how the Steinmetz team came out of nowhere to win and Plecki and his students become celebrities. However, when one spiteful student threatens to reveal the secret, both Plecki and his team are forced to scramble to cover up their cheating and prevent the truth from being exposed.
Cheaters is based on a true story, though I can’t tell you for sure how closely the filmmakers stuck to the facts of the case. (If you look at the film’s imdb page, you’ll find a lot of negative comments left by a lot of angry students from Whitney Young). However, what I can say is that Cheaters felt true. By that, I mean that Cheaters captured both the importance of competition in high school and the fact that, when you’re a teenager, everything is a drama and, as a result, it’s a lot easier to justify things that, as an adult, you would refuse to ever consider.
When I was high school, I was involved with both the Drama Club and Speech and Debate and watching Cheaters brought back a lot of memories. Cheaters gets all of the small details right — everything from the combination of exhaustion and exhilaration that comes from competing at an all-day tournament to the awkward attempts of “mature” adults to understand why winning is so important when you’re in high school.
Cheaters is also blessed with some excellent performances. As Whitney Young’s smug coach, Robert Joy is properly loathsome. Paul Sorvino brings some much-needed comic relief to the film and the scene where he awkwardly dances to the theme from Rocky is priceless.
The film, however, is truly dominated by Jena Malone and Jeff Daniels. As the film’s nominal protagonists, Malone and Daniels both give wonderfully nuanced performances. When the film starts, you find yourself rooting for both of them because not only are they likable performers but their characters seem so sincere in their desire to win. However, as the film progresses, we start to see the small chinks in their armor. We see how obsessed Jolie is with protecting Plecki. Meanwhile, Plecki goes from being an almost idealized teacher to being something of a megalomaniac. By the end of the film, we realize that we know far less about Jerry Plecki then we thought we did. Jeff Daniels gives a performance that forces us to draw our own conclusions about Plecki and his motivations.
Some people might question reviewing a film like Cheaters in a series about conspiracy-themed films. However, though it may not be as obvious as with a film like Three Days Of The Condor or JFK, Cheaters is a conspiracy film. Beyond the conspiracy to win the Academic Decathlon by cheating, Cheaters is about the much more subtle conspiracy that will always cause students who go to schools like Steinmetz to be viewed as being less important than the students at a school like Whitney Young. Cheaters is a film about a conspiracy, the conspiracy of cultural and economic elitism.
It’s a conspiracy that, Cheaters suggests, leaves many people with only two options: surrender or cheat.
Other entries in the 44 Days Of Paranoia:
A Christmas episode of the Twilight Zone? Yes, such a thing does exist. In Night of the Meek, an unemployed man (Art Carney) is given a chance to be Santa Claus. This is a wonderful episode that truly captures the spirit of the season.
Night of the Meek was written by Rod Serling and directed by Jack Smight. It was originally broadcast on December 23rd, 1960.
The National Board of Review announced their picks for the best films and performance of 2013 earlier today and the results are a bit … unexpected.
For best picture, they picked Spike Jonze’s Her, a film that has not exactly been seen as being an Oscar front-runner. Meanwhile, the two presumptive frontrunners — 12 Years A Slave and Gravity — had to make due with just being mentioned in the NBR’s Top Ten list. Also, it’s interesting to note that the NBR totally snubbed American Hustle which, just yesterday, was named best film of the year by the NYCC.
Despite the impression that one might get from a lot of breathless film bloggers (like me, to cite just one example), winning a critic’s prize does not automatically translate into Academy recognition. It’ll be interesting to see if the acclaimed but reportedly offbeat Her manages to turn the NBR prize into Oscar momentum.
BEST PICTURE
“Her”
BEST DIRECTOR
Spike Jonze, “Her”
BEST ACTOR
Bruce Dern, “Nebraska”
BEST ACTRESS
Emma Thompson, “Saving Mr. Banks”
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Will Forte, “Nebraska”
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Octavia Spencer, “Fruitvale Station”
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Joel and Ethan Coen, “Inside Llewyn Davis”
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Terence Winter, “The Wolf of Wall Street”
BEST ENSEMBLE
“Prisoners”
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
“The Wind Rises”
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
“The Past”
BEST DOCUMENTARY
“Stories We Tell”
SPOTLIGHT AWARD
Career collaboration of Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio
BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCES
Adele Exarchopoulos, “#Blue is the Warmest Colo#r”
Michael B. Jordan, “Fruitvale Station”
DEBUT DIRECTOR
Ryan Coogler, “Fruitvale Station”
CREATIVE INNOVATION IN FILMMAKING
“Gravity”
FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
“Wadjda”
BEST PICTURE NOMINEES (alphabetical)
“12 Years a Slave”
“Fruitvale Station”
“Gravity”
“Inside Llewyn Davis”
“Lone Survivor”
“Nebraska”
“Prisoners”
“Saving Mr. Banks”
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”
“The Wolf of Wall Street”
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE NOMINEES (alphabetical)
“Beyond the Hills”
“Gloria”
“The Grandmaster”
“A Hijacking”
“The Hunt”
BEST DOCUMENTARY NOMINEES (alphabetical)
“20 Feet from Stardom”
“The Act of Killing”
“After Tiller”
“Casting By”
“The Square”
BEST INDEPENDENT FILMS (alphabetical)
“Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”
“Dallas Buyers Club”
“In a World…”
“Mother of George”
“Much Ado About Nothing”
“Mud”
“The Place Beyond the Pines”
“Short Term 12”
“Sightseers”
“The Spectacular Now”
For today’s entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, we’re taking a look at Barry Levinson’s 1997 political satire, Wag The Dog.
Wag the Dog opens with a White House in crisis. With two weeks to go until the Presidential election, it’s been discovered that the incumbent President has had a brief dalliance with a girl scout. Up until the scandal became public, the President was enjoying at 17 point lead in the polls. Now, that lead is about to evaporate unless something can be done to keep the American public from thinking about the President’s personal life.
Significantly, the President himself never appears on-screen. We never learn his position on the issues. We never hear about anything he’s done during his first term. We don’t even know what political party he belongs to. (However, his opponent is played by Craig T. Nelson so I’m going to assume that the President is a Democrat. Because, seriously, it’s hard for me to imagine Nelson being anything other than a Republican…) The President remains a shadowy and insubstantial figure who, in the end, represents nothing.
Instead of getting to know the President, we instead spend the film with the aides who have to clean up after his mess. One of those aides, Winifred Ames (Anne Heche), calls in a legendary (and rather sinister) political PR man, Conrad Bean (Robert De Niro). Conrad announces that the only way to save the campaign is to distract the American public with a quick and totally fake war with Albania. Why Albania? According to Conrad, Albania has a sinister name and nobody knows anything about it.
To help create this fake war, Conrad recruits Hollywood film producer, Stanley Motts (a hilariously manic Dustin Hoffman). Much as Conrad is a legend in politics, Stanley is a legend in Hollywood. Stanley enthusiastically jumps into the project of creating a fake war of Albania, manufacturing everything from fake war footage to patriotic songs to anything else necessary to rally the American public. Denis Leary shows up as a mysterious figure known as the Fad King and schemes how to make war with Albania the latest trend. Willie Nelson sings a song to stir the spirit of every patriotic American. A very young Kirsten Dunst is recruited to play a terrified orphan in staged Albanian atrocity footage. A shell-shocked vet (Woody Harrelson) is cast as the Albanian War’s first hero. Stanley greets every problem with an enthusiastic exclamation of, “This is nothing!”
Along the way, a rather odd friendship develops between the secretive Conrad and the overly verbose Stanley. However, when Stanley, who often laments that he’s never won an Oscar, starts to complain about the fact that he’s never going to get any recognition for his “greatest production,” Conrad finds himself forced to reconsider their relationship.
Wag the Dog was first released in 1997 and, thanks to David Mamet’s darkly comedic script and Barry Levinson’s brisk direction, the film feels incredibly prophetic. Indeed, all the film needs is for someone to mention making the war a trending topic and it would be impossible to tell that it was made 16 years ago. Wag the Dog accomplishes the best thing that any political satire can hope to accomplish: it makes you question everything. Whenever one watches a news report triumphantly bragging about the latest done strike, it’s hard not to feel that Stanley Motts would approve.
Other entries in the 44 Days Of Paranoia:
The Academy has announced the 15 semi-finalists for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. 5 nominees will be picked from this list and then the winner will be announced on March 2nd.
I’m rooting for Stories We Tell. I’m also hoping that Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer will, at the very least, get a nomination.
“The Act of Killing,” Final Cut for Real
“The Armstrong Lie,” The Kennedy/Marshall Company
“Blackfish,” Our Turn Productions
“The Crash Reel,” KP Rides Again
“Cutie and the Boxer,” Ex Lion Tamer and Cine Mosaic
“Dirty Wars,” Civic Bakery
“First Cousin Once Removed,” Experiments in Time, Light & Motion
“God Loves Uganda,” Full Credit Productions
“Life According to Sam,” Fine Films
“Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer,” Roast Beef Productions
“The Square,” Noujaim Films and Maktube Productions
“Stories We Tell,” National Film Board of Canada
“Tim’s Vermeer,” High Delft Pictures
“20 Feet from Stardom,” Gil Friesen Productions and Tremolo Productions
“Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington,” Tripoli Street
I am not a huge Star Wars fan.
Don’t get me wrong. I respect the fact that the movies are important to a lot of my close friends and fellow movie bloggers. My boyfriend loves the first three Star Wars films and I’ve told him that if he ever wants me to wear a gold bikini and a chain around my neck, I’ll do it. It’s just that, on a personal level, the Star Wars films don’t do much for me. When people mention Star Wars, I usually think about how I fell asleep 10 minutes into Attack of the Clones and then when my date woke me up at the end of the movie, my bra had mysteriously been undone.
That said, I still knew that when I started my series of Christmas Past posts, I would have to post something about The Star Wars Holiday Special. The Holiday Special aired way back in 1978 and it was apparently such a disaster that George Lucas has spent the past 3 and a half decades trying to convince people that it doesn’t exist.
Perhaps that’s why, when I did a search for the Holiday Special on YouTube, I came across a lot of videos that had been either taken down or had their audio tracks removed.
However, I was able to find a 15 minutes video from a YouTube user who goes by the name of StarWarsFan1975. The Star Wars Holiday Special Retrospective features some background material on the Holiday Special and some of the special’s more bizarre moments.
Enjoy!
Through the Shattered Lens 