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

THE ART OF GETTING LET DOWN: PROJECT X REVIEW

     Have you ever been at the movies expecting one thing and getting something completely different?  I don’t mean like you go see Barney and Barbie Take Over Hollywood and it turns into Dog Day Afternoon, that’d be ridiculous and pretty cool. But anyways, today's review is Project X, directed by Nima Nourizadeh and produced by Hangover director Todd Philips.  This is one of those movies that you go expecting one thing and come out with another.

Despite the goblet, this film is nothing like Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

     I went to an advanced screening of Project X and was skeptical.  I’ll get to my grade later on but I’ll say now it wasn’t bad.  It’s being billed as “The Hangover with high schoolers”!  I’ll tell you now folks that’s wrong.  That’s wrong as hell.  It has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in common with The Hangover besides being about a night of partying. I’ll also point this out before I get to the heavy stuff:  There’s too many high school titties in this movie to be like The Hangover or to avoid possible federal investigation.  If you’re a 45 year old father of 2, don’t see this movie or you’ll have to register as a sex offender.

     Anyways, for the most part, the movie’s pretty solid.  Thomas Mann and Jonathon Brown (playing Tom and JB respectively) have solid performances.  The main cameraman (the movie’s shot from a handheld perspective of multiple characters but not like a bad Cloverfield/Blair Witch Project copy) Dax is a sweet reference to American Beauty and who doesn’t love allusions to great films?  The only performance that will make it or break it for people is Costa, the archetypal annoying-should-be-charismatic-but-really-isn't party guy as played by Oliver Jonah Hill Jr. Cooper.  Within 5 lines I wanted him publically executed, but that’s the exact character they wanted.  Plus he has a couple good lines, mostly about his penis.

^This guy.  The guy on the left.  His penis.

Okay, maybe not.

     The hilarious, extremely self-referential writing and screenplay are pretty fantastic besides the end which I’ll get to later.  The storyline moves quickly and gets pretty bizarre and I love it when that happens.  You really move and flow with the movie, which is always the best thing about a good script.  Plus this movie has almost everything any high schooler and college kid (meaning boy and some lesbians) wants: midgets, flying dogs, ecstasy, boobs, techno, weed, flamethrowers, anarchists, sex jokes, and of course, more booze than Lindsay Lohan drank since last Thursday.

     These among other things are what I absolutely loved about the movie.  The film works like the inverse of most other films.  Whereas most movies have sweet beginnings, middles you might get lost in, and good endings, this movie has an eh beginning, a beautiful, awesome middle, and an absolute grisly, disgusting trainwreck of an ending. 

     
     SPOILER ALERT!: This is what I didn’t like about this movie and it works on a few levels.  The whole time, this film works as if it were much more than the high school party gone awry film.  Everything gets so chaotic, so out of control, so excessive, that you can’t wait for Thomas Mann to get his ass whipped and punished by EVERYONE.  It was at this point that it hit me… This film is deep.  The film COULD BE a philosophical discourse on the nature of modernAmerican youth, cultural divides, coming of age, ecstasy and anarchy versus order and reason through the lens of Lockean and Hobbesian social contract theories (oh look at me being all college-y).  My heart was pounding, my mind was racing I was hooked, a mad junkie desperate for his next fix.  What I thought would be the final shot of a barren grey sky backdrop with Thomas Mann sitting alone and abandoned on the faint, dilapidated blue bleachers was gonna make me cry tears of sadness for him and at the beauty of it as a strangely beautiful work.  But then, right as I was about to give it a standing ovation for its multilayered successes, some strange specter from the deep dank abyss of pop culture came out of nowhere and delivered me such a blow to the stomach that I couldn’t even breathe.  I sat back in my chair for the next 15 minutes dazed, confused and wraught with despair as I watched this film commit cinematic suicide right in front my very eyes.
  

     The film had basically 5 or 6 endings.  The first one (the one I described) was amazing because it would have been open to interpretation and the good guy looked to have lost.  A Greek Tragedy. "What made him powerful kills him"; beautiful shit.  Real Raging Bull, Citizen Kane type shit.  Then the dad comes and is totally okay with what happened to his goddamn house; then everyone at school loves him and he gets the recognition he wanted; then the girl he screwed up with takes him back; then the news raves about the party; and then the executioner delivered the final crushing blow when Costa comes on and alludes to a possible sequel in a stupid staged tv interview.  The final ending is during the credits, where I cry for several hours about the end of the film.

     This movie should have quit while it was ahead but instead, so that it wouldn’t be a dark and moving morality tale of excess and its physical consequences and philosophical implications plus a sweet party flick, plays into every stereotype of the high school party comedy.  Because this movie had to ruin itself with its pitiful, sell out ending that made me and literally everyone else in the movie theatre who just wanted to see an open ending where the good guy tragically loses, want to set Todd Philips on fire, I award Project X despite all its great qualities a C+.

Orson Welles is not a fan.

C+

     Long winded, but true.  Follow me on Twitter for everything you need to know about movies and like the new Page on Facebook! As always,

~Viva amigos,

      ~D. Merrick

ROLL THE REEL: THE IN BETWEEN TEENS - 1915

Today's year on this fine, fine day of Merrick's March Movie Madness is 1915.

1915 was a watershed year in cinema all over the world (even FRANCE!), and it's one of my absolute favorite years.  The three movies I've selected may cause quite a stir for some, and their content back in the day made Al Capone cry and nuns quit the church to join biker gangs.

1915

And what a year it was folks!  To start things off:

I.     LA FOLIE DU DOCTEUR TUBE

Directed by Abel Gance

     This film is BY FAR one of the strangest thing ever thrown up onto a random screen somewhere in France (and that's saying something because there are A LOT of odd French films and I love them all).  

     La Folie du Docteur Tube is one of the first science fiction films and one of the first experimental films too.  To showcase the odd storyline (about a mad scientist with an oddly shaped head and bad teeth who invents a hallucinogenic powder and wreaks havoc on the world with it), Gance refrains from using title cards.  One is left to try to decipher this weird little movie to the best of their ability like all halfway decent experimental films that aren't churned out by some weird film student from SUNY Purchase.

     The film employs some of the first uses of curved lenses, fish-eye lenses, and fast-motion and they are used in a way that's still pretty masterful for today.  It's a hilarious sci-fi comedy that broke new grounds in experimental cinema.

II.     LES VAMPIRES (November 13th, 1915- June 30th, 1916)

Directed by Louis Feuillade

     With the exception of the early Lumiere Brothers films and Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon (1902) (among many of his other films), no other French film has had quite the influence of Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires.

     The 10 part, 400 minute crime story shot off like a kamikaze spaceship in the cinema world because there was nothing like it around.  No other film was willing to cover topics like Apache gangs, decapitation, and suicide at the time and more than that, none of them would SHOW IT.

     A remake of Les Vampires was attempted back in 1996 and it was alright, but nothing compared to the original.  Every exploitation film, art film, grindhouse grind, French New Wave, film noir, neo noir, and crime movie references this movie or shows its influence without even realizing it.  Even Fantômas (another Feuillade picture) hasn't had the sheer influence of Les Vampires.  

III.     THE BIRTH OF A NATION (February 8th, 1915)

Directed by D.W. Griffith

     America's not too proud of its past.  We've got more race hatred here than in four episodes of Roots.  However, out of that racism  came jazz and Spike Lee movies.  Also out of that racism came this one, my third favorite of 1915, the first American epic: The Birth of a Nation.

     D.W. Griffith's magnum opus is beyond large scale.  Clocking in at 3 hours and a $110,000 budget (massive for that time period), this movie redefined cinema.  It's one of the first blockbusters (don't tell Steven Spielberg that, there's a big difference between Birth of a Nation  and Jaws).  Even with its content that includes the Lincoln assassination and the "glorious" rise of the Ku Klux Klan, this film is absolutely beautifully realized by Griffith.

     Even if it's been used by the KKK and other white supremacist organizations to get angsty white teenagers to join their ranks, this movie changed everything.  Roger Ebert compared the film to Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will in terms of its beauty that everyone is afraid to recognize.  To all the naysayers I say this isn't Driving Miss Daisy or Amistad.  This movie is outwardly racist and doesn't sugarcoat it's racism.  I'm not saying that the racism is okay because that'd be dumber than the Bush Administration.  I'm saying that Birth of a Nation isn't about the racism.  It's about the majestic shots, the grand scale, and the depth of the plot.  It's a film that even with its controversy, is an absolutely breathtaking sight.

     1915 was a pretty wild year folks, and as the years go on the movies will just keep on getting wilder.  Coming up later on we've got our next favorite year here at Merrick's Movies:

1916

That's all for now people!  Follow me on Twitter for everything you need to know about movies: @DylanMerrick6

And remember as always!

~Viva amigos,

   ~D. Merrick

ROLL THE REEL: THE IN BETWEEN TEENS - 1914

To kick things off here folks in Merrick's March Movie Madness, I'm starting out my journey through cinema with the "In Between Teens".  

I call the 1910's the In Between Teens because this era was the questionable adolescence of cinema.  Cinema was unsure about itself like the lead character in a bad John Hughes movie (or all John Hughes movies) and was searching for a voice.  These years were formative for the entire world; imperialism was the diplomacy of choice; Empires were falling and being created everyday; the world was at war for the later half of the decade; the number of political movements growing and dying in America alone were creating turmoil, but also making the era truly exciting.  Taking a nod from the decade they were made in, films were never sure what was going to happen next.  It was in this decade that such celebrated filmmakers as Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chpalin, Yakov Protazanov, and Giovanni Pastrone got their start and cinema became a real contender (ANYBODY CATCH THE REFERENCE??) as an art form even without CGI, color, sound, or Botox.

My first favorite year in this crazy decade is 1914, the year War broke out in Europe and plenty of people in the U.S. were hesitant about getting involved.  1914 marked three watershed events in cinema that also happen to be three of my favorite movies.  ROLL THE REEL, JOHNNY.

1914

I.   KID AUTO RACES AT VENICE (Released Feb. 7th, 1914)

Directed by Henry Lehrman

     Ah, Chaplain you strange little man with a controversial mustache.  This film marked Chaplain's first appearance as his now iconic "Little Tramp" character that has been copied, covered, spoofed, mentioned, stolen, and emulated by everybody from Robert Downey, Jr. (in a film about Chaplain so I guess it makes sense) to Stanley Kubrick.

     Kid Auto Races at Venice is literally just 6 minutes of Chaplain getting booted off camera for getting in the way of almost every shot the director is trying to get of cars zooming past at a Venice Beach drag race.  What makes this film golden is the fact that it was actually improvised and he really was annoying the crowd (not the director who was in on the whole thing).  The facial and physical comedy, fluid editing, and camera movement were unheard of for comedy and are still too complex for most silly, brutally stupid, slapstick comedies of today (The Tooth Fairy anyone?).

     This film (along with Chaplain's debut Making a Living which came out literally 5 days before) established Chaplain as a superstar in the United States and every director, actor, bowler hat enthusiast, and movie lover can thank him and the silly cops and executives at Keyston Studios for that.

II.   GERTIE THE DINOSAUR (Released September 14th, 1914)

Directed by Winsor McCay

     Like all good children of the '90's, I'm an animation junkie.  If I could move into Rocko's Modern Life or into Dexter's Laboratory, I'd be typing this from the sketchbook of Joe Murray/Genndy Tartakovsky in a heart beat.  I've got an IV full of Spongebob and it's never leaving my mainline.  But enough of this Clinton-era nostalgia!  Were it not for this film, I'd be talking about going outside or some nonsense like that.

     Gertie the Dinosaur although is not the first animated feature film, is one of the most influential pieces of animation to ever spill out of the mind of someone with a name as nerdy as Winsor McCay.  The film is simply the chronicles of a dinosaur named Gertie and how she goes about her day in a prehistoric, animated world.  She's a very mischievous dinosaur and often gets scolded by the big bad director, who ultimately ends up jumping into her world to ride on her head into the sunset.

     Everyone from Walt Disney to Terry Gilliam to Trey Parker & Matt Stone have noted this film as an influence on their animation style for its playful nature with subtly subversive humor.  This groundbreaking piece of animated cinema was one of the first films to be recognized as a "masterpiece", and if you watch it, o fair reader, you'll see exactly why.

III.     CABIRIA (Released April 18th, 1914)

Directed by Giovanni Pastrone

     When it was re-screened at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, Martin Scorsese filmed an introduction about its beauty and importance to Italian cinema and all cinema.  This five part film odyssey is to Italy what Birth of a Nation is to America: the first film epic (...and a tool used by hate groups to get people to join their savage ranks but that's besides the point don't worry about it).  It forged new grounds for cinema in terms of scale, cinematography, and story that had yet to be tried and that most filmmakers are still fearful of today.

     Cabiria tells various stories from the history of the Roman Empire all woven into the life and love of one girl named Cabiria.  I do not want to spoil the plot of the film, nor do I want to spend the next 8 days typing, so I can only say WATCH IT. Although it's denser than Proust and longer than a 2 day acid flashback, it's one of the most amazing feats of film that you'll ever feast your eyes on.

     This movie is, like the others that I listed above, one of my absolute favorites and one of the major jumping points for film.  It came at a time when cinema was looking for a voice, and it gave movies a voice as epic and cool as James Earl Jones singing Rolling Stones songs in the shower.  This one raised the bar and remains an amazing, awe-inspiring sight today, which is not something that can be easily accomplished.  If I were to make a comparison, we watch this movie today the same way my 128 great great great grandkids (whose great great grandparents I didn't know existed or "paid child support" for) will look at The Lord of the Rings series; NOT Avatar or Titanic because everyone in the future will have run James Cameron back into the woods far away from movies where he belongs.

This marks the beginning, folks.

Stay tuned as Merrick's March Movie Madness continues with my next favorite year in cinema:

1915!

Follow me on Twitter ( @DylanMerrick6 ) for all the best movie info and news (plus some other stuff too from time to time).  And always remember!

~Viva amigos,

   ~D. Merrick

Roll the Reel: Merrick's March Movie Madness

THE PROLOGUE:

Alright folks, I've been in a pretty movie-related mood lately and am trying to ween myself off my Oscar addiction as soon as I can.  So, in lieu of all this, I've decided to use the next month (The month of March) to go through my favorite years in cinema, aside from your normal programming.  These are the years that make film students cry (because the movies are so mainstream), film critics smile (because they can keep their jobs), and normal people go "why do I care?" (because they have other far more important things to worry about like mortgages and stuff).

So stay tuned folks it's gonna be a fun time, Johnny and I will be kicking it off and rolling the reels... in STYLE!

The name's Bond, James Bond, and I love Merrick's March Movie Madness.

So sit down in your seat right in the middle of the front row, chow down on some popcorn, and get ready for so Merrick's March Movie Madness!

"I'd love to stay here and chat baby," said James Dean,
"but it's time for MERRICK'S MARCH MOVIE MADNESS."

LET THE GAMES BEGIN!



~Viva amigos,
   ~D. Merrick

Indie Movie Posters

I enjoy modern indie movies just as much as the next person who's bound to live in Brooklyn at some point or own a Macbook Pro.


Wait, that's not true at all.  I'd never move to that godforsaken town or own a Macbook Pro.  And more importantly, I hate most indie movies (but I love plenty of independent films).  Most indie movies are cheap rewrites of The Ice Storm or The Squid & The Whale directed by weird hipsters who want to be Woody Allen but have to settle for Steve Zissou-era Wes Anderson.  Some might call these affronts to the art of cinema a "guilty pleasure" (not the guy in the link), but these heathens are the same heathens that think Bon Iver is for something other than sleeping (thank you Justin Timberlake) or the Nissan Leaf is cooler than a '66 Mustang with a Fastback.


This is not say I dislike ALL modern indie movies.  Winter's Bone and Little Miss Sunshine were really good and Sideways is pretty perfect, but even for the ones I respect and/or appreciate, there's a commonality I simply can't bare anymore.  The posters. I don't know for certain who designs every indie movie poster, but my guess is it's one of these people:

(scientific classification: hipsterus badwigandmomssunglassesitium)

OR

any one of these three people (scientific classification: hipsterus AndyWarholicae williamsburghida)

Now, fair reader, the main genus of indie movie poster has many sub-classifications, but for the most part there is a common theme.  The main genus uses bright, primary colors almost blinding to normal human eyes (because they're not perpetually closed or wearing sunglasses) or natural scenery and a quirky font to accentuate the presence of an even quirkier looking person, couple, or group of people. It doesn't matter what the content of the movie is; whether it's a sad drama or a geek chic romantic comedy/adult-oriented dramady about a dysfunctional family (it's going to be one of these genres with something about the environment and Internet sprinkled throughout it), it will follow this basic schematic.  The general template for this type of indie movie poster looks something like this:

Here are a few examples of indie movies that employ this type of "adorkable" poster:

With Sundance and Berlinale having just finished up and Tribeca on the way in April, just remember to be wary of these posters, folks.  The movie could be as funny and moving as Juno, as badass and intelligent as Primer, or it could be another From Justin to Kelly (in which case, set the reel on fire and hope no others will have to see it again).  These aren't the days of the Jarmusch, Soderbergh, Tarantino, and Coen Brothers indie flicks anymore, people.  It's a sad, strange world out there.  

Keep your eyes out for upcoming indie movies with posters following this type and tweet them to me if you find them!  Follow me at: @DylanMerrick6

~Viva amigos,
   ~D. Merrick