A Press Release from the Bad Craziness Management

ATTENTION FAIR READERS!

We here at Bad Craziness International have been down for a few weeks due to renovations.
A few weeks ago, a terrible accident occurred that claimed the lives of 10,000 Bad Craziness Interns.  The Bad Craziness Central Aerospace Engineering Department built the first completely operational and inexpensive hovercraft based off of Syd Mead's spinner model in Blade Runner approximately 2 weeks ago.  Suddenly, an army of rabid mongoose busted through the door completely befuddling Bad Craziness' own Lloyd Dunn, John Lautner and Karl Benz.  Suddenly, the mongoose army let out a blood curdling war cry and destroyed everything in the room.  The sheer force of the savage mongoose rebels was too much and the jet propulsion systems erupted in a wild science fiction-y rage, destroying a solid 4% of our HQ.  It was a sad day, and we send our condolences to the families of our loyal employees.  But we are returning with a vengeance!
We would like to announce a brand new addition to our HQ.  A bigger, better department that we're surprised we've never had before.  OFFICIALLY, Bad Craziness International is now acquiring a film studio department!  We here at Bad Craziness International are proud to announce our newest addition to the Bad Craziness family: Bad Craziness International Studios.
There will be plenty of films being churned out by Bad Craziness International.  The debut film will be directed, written, and produced by our very own Dylan Merrick and his crack stock team (also employed by Bad Craziness) and we will announce the title in a few weeks once it goes into production.
Be prepared fair readers!  We hope this will be a bountiful journey but it will take your viewership which we are not afraid to gain using brute force.  Just saying.
So fare the well fair readers and welcome to Bad Craziness International Studios!

A word from our founder and creator

~Viva amigos
      ~the mgmt

Bad Craziness' Morning Coffee with Richard Pendergast: Alfred Hitchcock

A casual morning with Alfred Hitchcock

Bad Craziness' own Richard Pendergast (Dylan Merrick's twin brother, don't ask questions about their last names) sits down with newly resurrected zombie director, Alfred Hitchcock, for an exclusive interview!  You don't know Alfred Hitchcock?  Check yourself before you wreck yourself; here are a couple links.  AS ALWAYS!


~Viva amigos

 

The Shower Scene in Psycho (1960)

 

 

The ending of The Birds (1963)

 

Jimmy Stewart's nightmare in Vertigo (1958)

 

 

The Surrealist delusion sequence in Spellbound (1945)

Designed by Salvador Dali

Spring Movie Season: A Public Service Announcement from Bad Craziness

A small bit on the spring movie season.  We just installed the new Bad Craziness Central Audio/Audio Department here at the HQ, so now we're seeing how it does!  The picture is the head of the Bad Craziness Central Telepathy & Paranormal Department, Gustaav Smenhoultz.  Happy spring folks!

~Viva amigos

ROLL THE REEL: THE CINEMA DUST BOWL - 1933

Groucho Marx once said he doesn't know how the elephant got in his pajamas.  We here at Bad Craziness have no idea what that has to do with this post we were just wondering if someone could clear that up for us.  We'll confer with the Bad Craziness Central Philosophy & Ethics Department and get back to you on that one fair readers.


WAIT!  Besides the philosophical implications, I know what that quote has to do with this post.  It's a quote from a film by some of the guys in this post and it explains what 1933 was like in cinema. 1933 was one of those strange years that snuck up on everybody in the film world and left them confused as to what would happen next.


I.      ECSTASY (JANUARY 20th, 1933)

Directed by Gustav Machaty

      What good is life without a little nudity?  Maybe a couple orgasms now and again?  If you think life is better off without these things I a) recommend you never watch Ecstasy and b) stop playing World of Warcraft you strange little person.

     Most of the films that challenged the censors in the U.S. were crime films.  Back in the '30s, sex was REALLY taboo.  Besides drugs, sex was so taboo the censors felt the need to make an entire film about it.  Ecstasy challenged the Hayes censors and lost a battle it knew it couldn't win.  If it's 1933 and your film contains a naked Hedy Lamarr having an orgasm, consider yourself dead in the water compadre.  The film faced an extremely limited release in a few art houses in major cities and the word of mouth grew from there.

    Ecstasy's legacy is undisputed as one of the most controversial films to hit the silver screen.  Along with the being the first non-pornographic films to show full frontal nudity, it's also one of the first films to be condemned by the Legion of Decency.  Ecstasy's tale of a suicidal love triangle, divorce, and sexual frustration rocked the Breen Office and the general population like they were the goddamn Casbah and is still pretty risque for the modern day.

II.     DUCK SOUP (NOVEMBER 17th, 1933)

Directed by Leo McCarey

      Here at Bad Craziness International, these zany gentlemen reign supreme.  Outside our main headquarters (as well as a few of our thousands of satellite grounds scattered about the globe/solar system) there is a 30 foot, solid gold statue of the "mirror scene" that was made famous by this film.  This film is by far the finest piece the Marx Brothers ever did, and it brought stream of consciousness/political satire to the forefront back in the '30s.

      Duck Soup revolves around the life and times of the citizens of "Freedonia" (which on a side note was the name of America directly following the American Revolution), namely the new ruler Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx), Chicolini (Chico Marx), and Pinky (Harpo Marx).  Firefly is a cunning but absent-minded autocrat who doesn't care for the citizenry at all but instead cares about his own affairs.  Needless to say, the film's anarchic style of comedy became renowned for its fast-pace, quirky delivery, and ridiculous quality.  A joke could range from anywhere between a joke about Mrs. Teasdale's (Margaret Dumont, a Marx Brothers staple) taste in men to serious jabs and discourses at the nature of fascism and totalitarian states.  This sparked controversy back in 1933 when 4 Jewish guys were cracking jokes about Hitler and Mussolini, who, as you may not know folks, were in fact vehement anti-semites.

      Duck Soup has influenced every great comedian and comedy group that you can think of (and believe me, Bad Craziness knows EXACTLY what you're thinking, even before you do).  Woody Allen, Monty Python, Benny Hill, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Jon Stewart, Chris Rock, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Dave Chappelle, Mel Brooks, the writer of this blog, etc.  The Marx Brothers have a hand in almost every bit of comedy that's come out since their ferocious reign as the kings of comedy, especially in terms of political humor.  They were able to make political humor extremely dangerous because even when they didn't mean to make political comedy (like Charlie Chaplin), they managed to do it.

III.      KING KONG (MARCH 2nd, 1933)

Directed by Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack

      "It was Beauty killed the Beast".  King Kong is easily the most messed up love story ever told.  Not only does it argue in favor of bestiality, it caused riots outside of theaters for its gruesome and extremely sexual content.  This piece of cinema history from RKO Radio Pictures shook the world with its innovative special effects (done by Willis O'Brien who also worked on The Lost World and I don't mean Jurassic Park although Jeff Goldblum does everything justice) and subversive subtext.

      America loves itself some religion.  Every Sunday, a vast majority of people head on down to the local steeple and cook them up a heaping helping of Jesus Stew.  What's one thing that pisses off these Bible-thumping patriots more than gay marriage?  Sex.  Weird sex.  Homosexuality isn't weird.  Sex with animals is weird.  At least to the highly religious of all denominations and variations, not just Christians.  We here at Bad Craziness don't care what you do in the bedroom or barnyard (or couch or public bathroom or what have you), but religious people care where your pants lance does the dirtiest dirty dance.  Aside from the violence in King Kong that originally involved a decapitation and graphic depictions of people being crushed, there is a sexual subtext in the film that disturbed many in the audience: bestiality.  In one controversial, legendary scene, it is implied that King Kong gives a virtually naked Fay Wray a little "tickle" off screen that makes her giggle and moan.  So if the blood and vicious sound effects weren't going to bother the faint of heart with more religious conviction than the Grand Rabbinate and Pope Urban VI combined, then the implied interracial gangbangs, overt bestiality, and idea that women have sex for reasons other than childbearing might.

      King Kong in many ways is the first slasher film with its subversive themes and grisly presentation, and its legacy will live on forever.  From the classic Claymation to Fay Wray's legendary screams, this is one of our favorite movies and one of the most important films to come out of the cinema dust bowl.

1933 was in a way the last straw to the censors before they signed the Hayes & Breen Code of 1934 and these three movies tell you why, folks.  Next time we're hitting up the "greatest year in cinema history"

1939!

For a better look at 1933 check out these bad muthas:
The Private Life of Henry VIII

42nd Street

Flying Down to Rio

She Done Him Wrong

The Devil's Brother

Follow me on Twitter (DylanMerrick6) and like the Bad Craziness Facebook Page to learn so much about movies, you'll never need to speak to your friends again!  Happy Thursday hombres and as always!

~Viva amigos,

      ~D. Merrick

ROLL THE REEL: THE CINEMA DUST BOWL - 1932

The Thirties are often marred by an image of homelessness, abject poverty, the rise of fascism in Europe, civil unrest all over Asia, etc.  We here at Bad Craziness don't particularly care for that type of stuff.  It really just doesn't matter to us because it's all obviously over.  Nowadays we are lucky to live in a world without homelessness and poverty and civil unrest and tyranny, but it's nice to look back at the Thirties and laugh.


Wait, what am I talking about?  The Thirties were awesome if you weren't unemployed or starving!  It was the Swing Age!  Goodman, Charlie Christian, Glenn Miller, Django Reinhardt, Sir Duke, Billie; it must have been pretty grand.  The music was happy and jumping and so were the movies.  Movies rarely dealt with the Depression and with the exception of some subversive humor (The Great Dictator and Duck Soup), the only talk of dictators and fascism came from Disney cartoons and propaganda films, and they loved it.  People wanted distractions from their bleak horizons, so to keep the morale high all around the world, movies tried their best to be simple sources of entertainment.


This is what historians who don't know anything about movies will tell you.  Movies were just as deep and thought-provoking as they were back in the day and still are now.  The Hollywood System was strong as ever but foreign and independent films were also keeping pace.  The Thirties are often looked at as one of the greatest periods in film history (even after the Code was established) and we here at Bad Craziness want to give credit to all the different types of movies that came out in this wild, wild decade in cinema.  Originally we were going to do 5 years, but our Screening & History Department needed to get quarantined due to an Ebola outbreak, so we were only able to screen 3 years in time for print.  Sorry folks!  But to start things off we've got

1932!

I.      SCARFACE (APRIL 9th, 1932)

Directed by Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson

      "Say hello - to my little friend!"  That's from the Brian De Palma 1983 film Scarface.  This Scarface inspired that one and is even more gritty and violent.  This one makes the 1983 remake and many other gangster/crime films to come out after it look like a walk in the park with Barney the Dinosaur dressed as a unicorn in a tutu.

      Scarface broke new grounds in terms of what you could show on screen.  The main actors (Paul Muni and George Raft) built their performances off of real gangsters like Al Capone to make the film seem more realistic and dangerous.  Their personas in Scarface became the archetypes that characters like Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction, the MacManus Brothers in The Boondock Saints, and every Humphrey Bogart role would come to emulate and work off of.  The brutal ending (which I won't give away because it's too brilliant to rob you of the experience, fair reader) shocked and appalled executives to the point that they ordered an alternative ending be filmed and used.  Good thing they scrapped the alternative ending because it would make the movie lose some of its swagger.

      Along with The Public Enemy and Little Caesar, Scarface made those evil animals in the Hayes Office decide to create the censorship codes that wouldn't be broken until 1968 by films like The Graduate and Bonnie & Clyde.  More than that though, these Pre-Code crime films and especially Scarface blurred the line between judgement and glory, right and wrong, hakuna and matata (alright maybe not that last one) with gritty screenplays, grisly violence, and shadowy, almost horror-esque feel to them that would influence every film noir and neo-noir to come.

II.      FREAKS! (FEBRUARY 20th, 1932

Directed by Tod Browning

      If you think any of the Saw films or The Haunting in Connecticut are scary, you obviously haven't seen Tod Browning's Freaks.  Using actual circus sideshow "freaks", Tod Browning's film is one of those subversive films we mentioned before that apparently didn't exist in the '30s.

      Why do people forget about this movie?  Perhaps because it was banned for 30 years due to its horrifying content.  The original cut of the film featured graphic castration, mutilation, and even someone getting their arms and legs melted down to look like the wings and feet of a duck.  The screenplay was lauded by most of MGM's executives and director Tod Browning wasn't allowed to use big name actors to help sell the film.  Executives also cut over 30 minutes of footage so that audiences wouldn't run in fear every time they saw a dwarf.  One woman even sued MGM for the movie because it apparently caused her to have a miscarriage.

      Freaks is undoubtedly one of the most controversial films ever made and thus has become a midnight movie/counterculture icon.  But perhaps instead of just being an interesting film to see while in the throes of an acid trip (which it is if you're into absolutely terrifying experiences), Freaks is one of the first films to preach of tolerance and the loosening of control by governing bodies because the freaks can always rise up and turn them into hideous duck people.

III.     THE MUMMY (DECEMBER 22nd, 1932)

Directed by Karl Freund

      The '30s were the heyday of the Universal Horrors.  Frankenstein, Dracula, The Invisible Man, and of course, our feautre here: The Mummy.  Before the Ebola outbreak in the Screening & History Department's multiplex claimed the life of our Horror expert, Bela Lugosi (of no relation to the famed actor, but of relation to The Mummy's star Boris Karloff), we were going to do a feature on all the big Universal Horror monsters.  But alas, without a mind like that it would be a boring, ill-informed piece not worth your time, fair readers.

      What separates The Mummy from the other Universal Horror pictures?  Is it the advanced camera work and cinematography?  Is it the in depth research that went into making the complicated storyline?  Is it the intricate costuming and set design that made all the actual filming happen at night?  The answer is yes. It is all these things.  The slow, creeping camera put the film into Imhotep's point of view as opposed to the other Universal Horrors that spoke specifically from the protagonist's point of view.  What about the themes of the film?

      The Mummy is one of the first horror films that showed what a horror film is supposed to be: scary as hell and even more subversive.  The dead Pharaoh; the specter of the past haunting the ever so curious archaeologist?  SOUNDS LIKE A FIGURATIVE MEANING!  There are a million ways to analyze The Mummy and that's what makes it the first "modern" horror film: every piece of the production contains layers, some that are just plain creepy and some that stay in your brain so you can think about them and wonder why they're there, like that weird 45 year old guy in the trench coat at the back of the bar.

It's not a coincidence that these highly subversive films came out during the year of a presidential election, folks.  Cinema can be creepy and all conspiracy-theorist-y too.  There's a lot more to 1930's cinema than happy little musicals and guys in Frankenstein masks.  However, the movies we put here are nowhere NEAR the entirety of even 1932, they're just a couple of our favorites.  For a better look at 1932, try these on for size:

Horse Feathers

Shanghai Express

Grand Hotel

Vampyr

Rasputin, Damon der Frauen (Rasputin, Demon with Women)

Umarete wa mita keredo (I Was Born, But...)

Next time right here in Bad Craziness IT'S!

1933!

More to come from all of us here at Bad Craziness folks!  Follow me on Twitter and like the Facebook Page for simply TOO MUCH about movies!  Happy Tuesday hombres, go outside and get some sunlight (just kidding it's raining) and as always,

~Viva amigos,

       ~D. Merrick

FOR THE LADIES

In honor of International Women's Day, we here at Bad Craziness wanted to make a post to recognize some of the coolest ladies in cinema.  Some of them you know, some of them you may not know, others are obscure/foreign because some people on our staff listen to Bright Eyes and Dan Auerbach's solo album.  ROLL THE REEL, JOHNNY!

BAD CRAZINESS' ROUGHENEST, TOUGHENEST, LADIENEST, LADY ACTRESS

BETTE DAVIS
 Bette Davis did for the world and art of the actress what Brando did for actors.  She added a new element to what a female could do on screen.  As opposed to being an object of sex, a weak, fragile creature who needs a man to keep her afloat, or a a weak, fragile object of sex who needs a man to keep her afloat, Bette Davis decided she would be smacking guys and running off on her own.  If a producer told her to tone down her "radical feminist" approach to acting, she'd just tell him that she wouldn't do the part.  She used her power as an actress to be one of the first real strong business ladies in Hollywood and got her parts by her own accord when people were still slaves to the Hollywood System.  Davis took care of herself and that's why we here at Bad Craziness think she's one of the roughenest, toughenest, ladienest ladies in the history or cinema.

BAD CRAZINESS' ROUGHENEST, TOUGHENEST, LADIENEST LADY OF DIRECTING

AGNES VARDA
 In a time where women were still trying not to go completely insane from being locked in a house 24/7, Agnes Varda decided "Nah, I'm gonna be one of the biggest names of the French New Wave Movement instead".  Of course, she said it French because she's French.  This stone cold wild woman is still making movies and although she claims The Beaches of Agnes would be her last movie, we hope she keeps on making movies forever.  She was one of the only filmmakers along with Robert J. Flaherty and Mira Nair who has been able to successfully combine elements of Documentary and experimental narrative film in a way that doesn't seem like The Devil Inside.  Keep on keeping on Ms. Varda, the real Queen of France.

BAD CRAZINESS' ROUGHENEST, TOUGHENEST, LADIENEST LADY OF WRITING

KRISTEN WIIG
 That's right.  Bad Craziness loves Bridesmaids.  It was one of the best written films of last year PLUS it gave a new legitimacy to comedy that has been lost since the days of SOB, Fritz the Cat, Annie Hall, and Clerks.  Kristen Wiig is not only one of the funniest ladies alive, she's one of the funniest people alive.  Our Surveillance Department overhears a lot of conversations about Wiig being "like the new Tina Fey".  We've sent out contract hits on those people because they are dead wrong.  Kristen Wiig is a monster all her own and she's venturing into the grounds of comedy screenplay writing where no lady has gone before and nobody has been able to do consistently for a while.  No one expected that Oscar nomination but we all know they deserved it just the same.  Kudos, Ms. Wiig!

Happy International Women's Month everyone!  And from all of us here at Bad Craziness, happy Monday and as always,

~Viva amigos,
      ~D. Merrick

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JIM JARMUSCH

Independent cinema would be nothing without Jim Jarmusch.  You know those movies, fair readers, that consist of indie hipsters talking about their problems with sparse, dry humor?  Jim Jarmusch was making fun of those movies before they even existed.  We here in the Bad Craziness Central Surveillance Department love this man, so we decided to stalk him as he went about his daily routine.

Jarmusch is notorious for being quite the aloof character.  He always outsmarts the media how ever he can.  All of us in the B.C.C.S.D. were thoroughly convinced that we could get a shot of him doing Jim Jarmusch-type things (we even had a handwritten copy of his daily routine that we fished from his trash), but alas we were not so fortunate.  This slippery Ohioan escaped our photographic clutches, but we will be at it again one day, especially since we know EXACTLY what he does throughout the course of his day.

Here is a slideshow of the pictures our crack team of photographers took just missing  Mr. Jarmusch:

Slide #1:   In this one, we caught Mr. Jarmusch en route to Penn Station.  We heard that he needed to see one of his many mistresses in Memphis that he met while filming Mystery Train back in '89.  The Bad Craziness Tech Crew attempted to use our patented PigeonCam (hence the bird in the picture), but it malfunctioned.  Okay, to be honest, mano y mano here, we strapped a camera onto a random pigeon and it fell off.


Slide #2:   This one was taken by our one and only man on the street, Caveman Jack.  Jack is usually quite the spy when it comes to stealing pictures of celebrities.  He's dressed up as a homeless person, a hobo, a bum.  Okay, in all seriousness this is some homeless guy that we gave a camera and he ended up taking a picture of Jim Jarmusch's feet.  He was quite delusional and we're surprised that he even knew how to pick the thing up.


Slide #3:   This one is my personal favorite because it's the closest we actually got to seeing Jarmusch.  This is a picture of the parking garage on the Lower East Side where Jim has kept his car for the past 23 years.  He yelled that to us from beyond the way and told us to keep back or he'd "call up the dogs".  We weren't sure if he was serious, but we weren't gonna chance that.


Slide #4:   This is one of two actual photos of Jim Jarmusch that we were able to land.  Shelletivka Bramrofsky, one of our many former-KGB agents here at Bad Craziness, took this picture with our patented BackpackCam using the mirror thing you can find on ceilings in most malls.  This was taken while Jarmusch was going for his weekly pedi in Jersey City.


Slide #5:   This is the other photo of Jarmusch that we got.  People know Jim Jarmusch by his iconic pompadour style haircut (of which everyone here at Bad Craziness has) but in this photo, our crack field reporter, Woody Bernstein, was able to get a rare photo of Jarmusch before unleashes the beast.  He woke up on the sidewalk, in his un-pompadoured glory, after a night of heavy drinking with the RZA, Bill Murray, and Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello.


Slide #6:   This is the final photo and ironically the first one taken of Jarmusch's apartment on the Lower East Side.  He set booby traps for people who attempt to take pictures of his apartment (whether they be stalkers or journalists) and this is one of those "mid-booby-trap" kind of photos.  One of our men in the field, Cary Grant (of no relation to the actor; believe me, we do blood tests), snapped this one right before he fell into the manhole.

Perhaps we'll get him when we work the Tribecca Film Festival this year!  Keep your fingers crossed fair readers, keep your fingers crossed!  Happy Monday hombres and as always,


~Viva amigos,
      ~D. Merrick


DISCLAIMER:  We here at Bad Craziness International were not stalking Jim Jarmusch.  This is for a project one of our younger employees had to complete.  We said we'd help him out, but we don't like him very much so we didn't try to hard for him.  In fact, we're sacking him using this blog.  Sorry Jim, better luck at your next job!


~Sincerely,
      ~Bad Craziness Cen. Mgmt. Dept.

ROLL THE REEL: THE ROATING TWENTIES - 1927

There's a fantastic documentary about the emergence of grunge back in 1991 called 1991: The Year Punk Broke.  This post has nothing to do with that film.

However, 1927 is one of the years where cinema broke so I guess that's why I decided to include that little bit.  Or maybe it was the complaint of one reader that I don't have interesting introductions (pardon me for not having jetpacks like the intro to Thunderball).  Whatever the reason, it's time to get beyond that and step right into 1927 which is by far one of the most important years in movies!

I.     WINGS (AUGUST 12th, 1927)

Directed by William A. Wellman

     I personally find it pretty awesome that the first movie and the last movie to win the Best Picture Oscar are the only two silent films on the list.  Wings is the first big winner at the first Academy Awards and to many it stops there, but this film has a lot more to it than just that.  It's actually good (it's not Slumdog Millionaire or worst of all Titanic).

     With the inception of talkies back in '27, I'm gonna focus on some of the last great silent films from 1927.  This film broke grounds in terms of what you could show on screen and how they were shown.  This movie has Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen sharing a smooch!  It's got Clara Bow's boobs!  And it won an Oscar?  Controversial subject matter won an Oscar?  1927 must have been some strange, alien world where artistic talent is recognized and not subject to the scrutiny of prude soccer moms whose husbands haven't touched them in years so they take their weird sexual frustration out on us.  ANYWAYS!  This movie also revolutionized the way one could operate a camera.  The fluid, realistic flight sequences made some audiences gasp, gave a few WWI veterans a delusional bout of PTSD, and made a few of the friskier teenagers in the back think they were officially in the mile high club.

     Wings marked the end of true recognition for American silent cinema, but it was a fine note to end on.  Plus, along with It and Mantrap, exhibited Clara Bow during the peak of her career.

II.     METROPOLIS (JANUARY 10th, 1927)

Directed by Fritz Lang

      Fritz Lang is the King of Weird.  In terms of film, this guy's like Klaus Nomi's biological grandfather (his grandmother being David Bowie).  Metropolis is one of Lang's best, one of his weirdest, and perhaps his most important.

      One thing that a lot of moviegoers don't pay much heed to is sets.  Sets are one of the most complicated and important aspects of filmmaking.  Sets determine almost everything about a scene or a shot and Metropolis is one of those movies that defines what a great set is.  Taking a nod from other German Expressionist films, Lang and his set crew built sets (that's right, Fritz Lang was such a total bad ass that he helped build the sets so no one could screw it up) that are nightmarish, angled, and some of the sickest realizations of pre-Jetsons retrofuturism ever put on film.  This wild surrealist dream-like silent film experience is so revered that German techno band Kraftwerk released a new restoration of it with a complete electronica soundtrack.  When I say this film is golden folks, I mean it makes Saddam Hussein's palace look like the dilapidated cardboard box that Clint Eastwood was raised in by rabid wolves.

      The film deals with the then-current rise of fascism in Germany, as well as the pitfalls of capitalism and Soviet communism.  Metropolis is one of the first movies to give some academic/intellectual legitimacy to film, but especially science fiction and horror cinema.  That is why we geeks (like Terry Gilliam of Monty Python, Joss Whedon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame, Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, and Stanley Kubrick) love it so much.  When a card-carrying member of the complete nerd community (such as myself) watches this movie, think of it as being akin to a Buddhist watching Siddhartha Gautama strumming out a few verses of WAR's "Why Can't We Be Friends?" on the old keytar.

III.     NAPOLEON (APRIL 7th, 1927)

Directed by Abel Gance

      Abel Gance is the greatest director of the Silent Era.  Rednecks and other racial purists might boast about D. W. Griffith; hippies and hipsters may talk about some weird Indian woman who recorded a Bengal Tiger sleeping for 8 hours and call it art; normal people who aren't easily categorized by wretched, terrible savages like me might say Cecil B. DeMille because they can't think of anyone else; then again they might also say "get away from me with that tape recorder you strange little shell of a man and quit asking me about movies", but that only happened to me once.  Movie people who know movies and love movies as if movies were some weird appendage flying out of their heads know that no one was able to do what Abel Gance did. Napoleon is this brilliant director's magnum opus.

      Napoleon tells the story of this dictator you probably haven't heard of: Genghis Kahn.  No, I'm just kidding it tells the story of everyone's favorite dwarf with a Freudian issue.  It weaves Napoleon's tale dramatically and theatrically, but none of  that would have been possible without two things: 1) A stone cold beast of a lead in Albert Dieudonné and 2) Some of the most innovative technical work to ever be spit out of a projector.  This movie has some of the first fluid moving camera work that wouldn't be seen again until movies like Citizen Kane and Paths of Glory.  Gance employed every handheld, dolly, tracking, and tinting technique that leave audiences in awe and film buffs crying dearly for their sweet, old mothers.  This is another one of those films that I'd love to say more but I'd rather have this beautiful pillar of French/all cinema speak for itself.

      Napoleon didn't gain the recognition it deserved back in the day because its technical beauty was beyond comprehension in these early, golden days of cinema.  Yet today in the modern world, it is revered and respected as one of the greatest pieces of all time.

     Well fair readers, we have to leave the Jazz Age in favor of the Great Depression (which makes this sound a lot worse than it is), but the effect of these early days will stay with us forever.  Especially with The Artist winning Best Picture, these movies are gaining more notice than ever before and deservedly so.  But now, with a tear in our eyes, a song in our hearts, and excitement in our unmentionables, we leave the Roaring Twenties for the 1930's: The Cinema Dust Bowl.  Next time here on Bad Craziness it's

1932!

     For a better look at the cinema of 1927 be sure to check out these movies folks OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES:

It

The Jazz Singer (the first talkie!)

My Best Girl

The End of St. Petersburg

     That's all from Bad Craziness!  Follow me on Twitter and like the Facebook Page for literally TOO MUCH information on movies!  Dancing Days are here again hombres and remember as always,

~Viva amigos,

      ~D. Merrick

ROLL THE REEL: THE ROARING TWENTIES - 1925

1925

    We're half way through the Jazz Age and film is on a fiery, dangerous trail hellbent on changing the world for good.  Movies were moving so fast it'd make your head spin with such centrifugal force, you may be mistaken for a blender.  1925 marked a year in innovation comparable to the invention of string cheese (meaning it was a groundbreaking, historic, celebrated time).  In the world of cinema circa 1925, things were like this in the words of a better man than, I fair readers:

I.     THE LOST WORLD (FEBRUARY 2ND & JUNE 22ND, 1925)

Directed by Harry Hoyt

      There are very few films that can say they've influenced as many movies as The Lost World.  And The Lost World can't say it because it's a silent film GET IT???  Anyways, before my comedy gets any worse, let me spin you why this movie changed so much.

      The effect that this non-Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle adaptation has had on visuals is equivalent -- if not beyond -- the effect that Star Wars or The Matrix has had.  The stop motion/Claymation we laugh at with love in our hearts during Christmas time when we watch Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer all began with this movie.  In fact, the special effects designer for another film famous for its stop motion (the original RKO King Kong), Willis O'Brien, got his start by pioneering his method in The Lost World.  It was so frightening back in the day that people became frenzied at the likeness, running out of the theater without realizing they didn't live in prehistoric times/an uncharted region of South America.  The interactions between the stop-motion dinosaurs and the actual actors was unprecedented until the 1940's with televised cartoons.
      This story of adventure, romance, and prehistoric animals shocked and exhilarated audiences; propelling cinema to new heights and probably causing several heart attacks in its wake.


II.     THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (DECEMBER 21st, 1925)

Directed by Sergei Eisenstein

      "That movie with the stairs and the old lady, right?"  To many in America, The Battleship Potemkin is a classic but they don't know why or they don't know it at all.  This Soviet propaganda film changed a lot about cinema in terms of themes and presentation.  Think like Quentin Tarantino only instead of snappy dialogue and Spaghetti Western references, it's got themes of Bolshevism and history that never happened.

      Potemkin was one of the first movies to have a discourse on violence.  It celebrates the death of a Czarist ship captain at the hands of a mutinous crew, but when the Cossacks shoot at will into a crowd, nobody's very happy about it.  Besides these philosophical quandaries, the film also revolutionized the "tracking shot".  You know how in movies the camera moves in sync with the action of a scene?  Like in the 1998 Godzilla when Matthew Broderick and the mini-Godzillas are chasing each other around adorably in Madison Square Garden?  Or in every shot of a Michael Bay movie?  Okay, that's a bad example, people shouldn't be watching Michael Bay movies.  But tracking shots are one of the basic "variant" shots in movies, and in the famous Steps scene of The Battleship Potemkin we find one of the most influential uses of all time (which is why it's the link up above).

      Every pretentious film school loser may talk about this film like it's God's gift to the Earth (but they use God figuratively, religion's too mainstream) and it's not; it's Sergei Eisenstein's and our good friends in the old USSR's propaganda office.  This movie showed people the value in moving the camera and using production as well as the plot line to introduce and analyze themes, thus setting the grounds for the study of film as an art form.

III.      THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (NOVEMBER 25th, 1925)

Directed by Rupert Julian

      No, sorry folks, this version is not the one with Gerard Butler.  This version (the original version) of Phantom stars the man of a thousand faces himself, Lon Chaney.  In one of his most revered roles (plus he's alongside one of the most beautiful ladies of cinema, Mary Philbin), Chaney dons the mask of the Phantom, but when it's stripped away, cinema changed forever.

      The Phantom of the Opera revolutionized a few things.  For starters, Chaney's innovative costume and make up gave the art of film design a greater depth than it had before.  On the same production note, Phantom changed the way we see movies.  To add to the theatrical and Expressionist vibes of the film, editors Lois Weber and Maurice Pivar and cinematographer Virgil Miller worked together to change the way we see movies.  While filming, Miller put colored gels on the lens of the camera to change the tint of the scene.  In some scenes in fact, Technicolor was used in the process thus making The Phantom of the Opera one of the first color films.  To bring out the colors, Miller used extreme lighting techniques (seen in Expressionist horror films like Dr. Caligari and classic film noirs such as The Big Combo or The Third Man) to accentuate the look of each shot.  In the editing room, Pivar and Weber sharpened the look of each frame and used dramatic cuts to make the whole thing work together.  In the words of a corny educational children's program: and the rest is history!

      Phantom may not be the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical that we all know (meaning it's actually really good), but with its history of experimentation and some of the most remarkable performances from the Silent Era, we here at Bad Craziness believe it's an enduring legend and one of our favorite films.

      For an even better look at 1925, check out these movies too readers!:
      - The Gold Rush
      - The Big Parade
      - Ben-Hur
      - The Freshman
      - Orochi

      That's it for 1925 folks, next time it's on to

1927!

      Follow me on Twitter and like the Facebook Page for your movie fix all you sick addicted junkies!  Happy Thursday hombres and as always,

~Viva amigos,

      ~D. Merrick