ESSENTIAL CINEMA - Buster Keaton's The General

Though it's all but disappeared as a subject for Hollywood, you could make a good case that the American Civil War helped launch the movie business. After all, it provided the spark for the first blockbuster, D.W. Griffifth's 1915 "The Birth of the Nation," a film whose first half still impresses with its uncanny visual veracity -- you could be watching tattered newsreel footage of the war itself. Only Griffith's bilious sentimentality reminds us that Hollywood's worst qualities were born here, too. (The surreal racism that blights the film's second half, which portrays the Ku Klux Klan as heroic freedom fighters battling the sinister ex-slaves, makes it seem like a film made in some parallel universe where the South actually won the war.) But 11 years later, a far greater artist made an infinitely greater film, one that the world's most famous movie critic would rank among the ten best movies ever made. Strange to say, that film was a boisterous comedy made by a great comedian, and one that can still leave them in the aisles, as they say, today.

The film is "The General," Buster Keaton's 1927 masterpiece, though I hesitate to apply the word "masterpiece" to anything this funny. But Orson Welles (who ought to know) once said that Keaton's film was a hundred times more gorgeous-looking than "Gone With the Wind," and the proof is on the screen for anyone to see. Whereas that great Hollywood epic concerns itself with large matters -- an epic romance, an epic war, the fall of a city, the disappearance of a civilization -- "The General" concerns itself with the adventures of an ordinary young man and his love for his train. His story is set in the South, but the war doesn't concern him too much, except that it leads to him getting rejected by his girl when the Confederate army turns him down. The film, loosely based on a real historical incident, concerns Our Hero's attempt to steal his beloved locomotive, The General, back from the Yankees. (Oh, he also needs to rescue his girlfriend -- but you suspect that the train is really what matters here.) Complications ensue and of course, it all winds up with a terrific chase scene -- one of the best in the movies, and apparently the single most expensive movie sequence filmed up to that time.

In his day, Keaton was eclipsed by Charlie Chaplin; later, it became hip to say that Keaton was the real genius, and Chaplin a mere crowd-pleaser. In fact, there's no reason to choose; between the two of them, you have two types of comedy that cancel each other out. Chaplin is funny because he does funny things; he can't walk into a room without the ceiling caving in, or the floor turning into a skating rink. Keaton is funny because he doesn't do funny things; instead, he remains perfectly still, almost untouched as the world falls apart around him. If the ceiling caves in, you can bet that Keaton will have his back turned to it, lost in some reverie. He greets catastrophe and triumph alike with a thoughtful, melancholy gaze -- and, of course, he always comes out on top. In my favorite shot of "The General" (also, incidentally, one of the most dangerous stunts ever filmed), after being rejected by his girl, Buster glumly sits down on one of the coupling rods between two of his train's wheels to think. The train starts moving and the wheels begin to turn. Keaton remains sitting there, going around and around and around. Still thinking.

Buster Keaton's "The General" plays at The Loft Cinema Sunday, July 11, at 1 p.m., and Tuesday, July 13, at 7 p.m.

-- Justyn Dillingham is a 2009 graduate of the University of Arizona. He ever so slightly prefers Chaplin to Keaton.

Top Ten - The Loft's Favorite Silent Films

Buster Keaton's THE GENERAL is this month's Essential Cinema film.  In honor of this classic silent film, The Loft staff has submitted some of their favorite silents.  Enjoy!

10. Safety Last

9. The Passion of Joan of Arc

8. Sunrise

7. Napoleon

6. City Lights

5. Roundhay Garden Scene

 4. Metropolis

3. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

2. Un Chien Andalou

1. Nosferatu

ESSENTIAL CINEMA is The Loft's FREE monthly series of classic art films on the big screen. See old favorites, hidden gems and exciting re-discoveries the way they were meant to be seen - with an audience and on the big screen in glorious 35 mm!

Buster Keaton's THE GENERAL

Sunday, July 11th at 1:00 p.m.
and Tuesday, July 13th at 7:00 p.m.

 

First Friday Shorts, July 2, 2010 - Howard Salmon

Tonight, at “First Friday Shorts”, there was something for everyone: animation, gross-out humor, art films. campy mini-dramas, gratuitous sex, gratuitous violence, and music videos. The previews alone constituted their own mini film festival: they were raunchy, hilarious, gross, and full of cool style.  For example,  there were ads for a Joan Rivers “tell all” documentary, a children’s film festival (e.g. the Muppets),  a movie called “Trash Humpers” about people humping bags of trash, a slasher flick (“Boarding House”), a documentary about the artist “Banksy”,  and “Team America World Police” Curse-A-Thon (in honor of the upcoming Fourth of July holiday).  

When the event started, we learned that Max Cannon wasn’t able to attend tonight. so local comedian Mike Sterner & his sidekick Bridgitte would takeover the hosting honors. Mike had an interesting way of hitting the gong: instead of bashing it, like in one of those old Kung Fu movies (to announce the entrance of the Emperor), Mike would gently tap it and then hold a microphone up to it. The resulting gong noise ended up sounding like weak amp feedback.  

The first movie, “Tapeworm 2”, I found to be amazing. I was very impressed by it, for reasons I’ll describe in a moment; it ended up being the crowd favorite, with it’s creator, Brian McAdams, taking home a $200 prize check for his entry at the end of the night. “Tapeworm 2” was an incredible mix of three types of animation: largely made with old fashioned stop-motion animation (using Lego toys),  with added Flash animation and what looked like CGI effects (e.g. waving computerized flames). The “sets” were just whatever furniture happened to be in the way, with the entire movie having been shot in and around someone’s house. The soundtrack was some old fashioned heroic classical music, connecting it yet again to the traditions of an earlier era. The “plot” involved the adventures of pieces of blue masking tape who inch around like microscopic organisms. Very creative, industrious,  and humourous. What a great way to start out the film fest!  

What followed after that never rose to the level of “Tapeworm 2”, but was still a lot of fun. “Taking Advantage” was a campy drama that looked technically professional, but lacked direction. It got gonged, and I found Bridgitte’s confrontational stance towards the filmmaker a bit rude (“Your movie has no passion! Oh, now are you going to tell us we suck??” she taunted the filmmaker after it got gonged).  “Nerds Gone Camping” was a low-budget ridiculous story that felt totally amateurish, except that it had an excellent sense of comedic timing (GONGED!) “Baked Alaska” was a story about the filmmaker mixing roadkill into cake batter, and cooking it for his mother, who lives out of a trailer in Yellowstone National park.  There were many shouts to gong this sucker…but Mike let it play out. (We all got to watch the filmmaker’s mother eat roadkill cake)

Of course at any “First Friday Shorts”, there are those who give up even trying to please the crowd, and instead make films that are shorter then three minutes. There were a handful of those, and one of them was actually pretty good. It was comprised of several quick cuts of close-ups of various tools at a construction site. The fast pace kept it interesting, even though it really wasn’t about anything. When it was over, Mike Sterner pointed out a lesson we could all take home with us: if your movie is cut extremely tight, it will be interesting.  

Another art film that impressed me was “Movement Andante”. This entire black-and-white silent film consisted of a closeup of a fleshy hairy crack. I couldn’t tell if it was a closeup of someone folding their arm, or if it was a piece of carpet. It was also undulating in a repetitive way, giving the illusion that something sexual was happening on the screen, but it was actually a very abstract closeup of something flexing and contracting over and over again. The audience watched it for the entire length of the film, obviously seduced. But there’s no way that a minimalist art film is going to win the $200 prize! But it was a memorable part of the lineup.

There were also some creepy horror type flicks, which felt like a tip of the hat to David Lynch, and at the end, there was a funny and erotic gameshow spoof called “Hookup”, which was very titillating, on at least two levels.

Tucson’s got talent! Tune in next month for another review of the Loft Theater’s “First Friday Shorts”

  

No More Popcorn: The Curious Legacy of Troll 2 - By Matt Wavrin

 Troll 2 (1990) occupies a unique spot in trash film history. Shot in Utah by Italians, it packs so much craziness into its 95 minutes that one is left with an overdose of genuine oddity. What is Troll 2? A condemnation of vegetarians, according to Rosella Drudi, who co-wrote the story with the film’s director, Claudio Fragasso (credited as Drake Floyd). Or is it about evil, vegetarian Mormons? Who knows? What is obvious is that the film bears no relation to the original 1986 Troll with Sonny Bono, and in fact contains not trolls, but goblins. All of this, and some serious homoerotic undertones to boot.

 In case you’re confused about the fact that they are indeed goblins, the name of the town to which the Waits family travels is called Nilbog (“Goblin spelled backwards!”). Troll 2 blurs the criterion for what makes a bad film, though it is indeed considered one of the worst of all time. In terms of technical matters, acting, and nearly every other superficial category, yes, it is a bad film. If one considers pure entertainment value, originality, daring, comedic value, and extreme weirdness as a high virtue, it is hardly a bad film, and its cult has only grown over the years.

This cult is of concern to Michael Stephenson, who played young Joshua, pisser of hospitality, in the film. His documentary, Best Worst Movie, shows the repercussions of being involved with such a travesty. The cast recalls the supreme embarrassment felt after seeing Troll 2 for the first time, and the film shows what has happened to the cast after two decades of shame. Fragasso seems to fashion himself a Fellini-esque auteur and believes his film to be great and detests the actors. The father in Troll 2, George Hardy, is a divorced dentist in Alabama and serves as the documentary’s star. Don Packard, who played the demented drugstore owner, confesses that he was actually going through some serious mental issues during the filming of the movie. Margo Prey, the Waits mother, is now a paranoid cat lady who wishes not to be involved with the film’s newfound popularity. What it all adds up to is that being part of a baaaad cult classic has its rewards and its pitfalls, such as being totally ignored in England and at a horror convention in the States. Yet there is such sweetness in Stephenson’s film—it is about the love of movies, no matter the artistic value. And that’s not something to piss on.

Frankenstein’s Daughter (1958) - Billups Allen

Frankenstein’s Daughter is one of those great, nonsensical science fiction movies from the late 50s where the science and motivation of the characters doesn't make much sense. Dr. Frankenstein’s grandson (which I believe isn’t possible as the story takes place in 1958) wants to continue his family’s eccentric work. But this particular Dr. Frankenstein, hiding in America under the moniker Oliver Frank (Donald Murphy), isn’t as much an insane genius as he is just a jerk. He is taking advantage of poor Professor Carter Morton (Felix Locher) by using his lab, screwing up his research, and drugging his daughter. It sort of serves Morton right for not asking for references. Frank cannot even produce a fake I.D. that says who he is. For a Frankenstein, he is a pretty lackluster mastermind.

When Frank drugs Morton’s daughter Trudy (Sandra Knight), she becomes this sort of Frankenstein’s monster/werewolf hybrid. She runs around town in a bathing suit terrorizing people. This is endlessly amusing to the local police department. When Frank is not drugging Trudy, he is sexually harassing Trudy’s friend Sally (Suzie Lawler). Frank turns Sally into the permanent monster that is inherently promised by a Frankenstein narrative. The monster is a man in a very masculine looking mask. There is noting remotely feminine about the monster, which is not created from the only daughter in the story, which is not Frank’s daughter anyway. A better title would be: Frankenstein is Sexually Harassing Someone’s Daughter’s Friend, Eventually Turning Her Into a Man. I guess that doesn’t fit on the marquee. On the plus side, Frank’s monster is better behaved than his creator; it knocks on the front door of the house before revealing itself. 

 If this sounds at all complicated, it really isn’t. Because of the thin plot, Frankenstein’s Daughter contains one of my favorite elements to be occasionally inserted into movies from the 1950s: a performance by a rock band. The Page Cavanaugh Trio, a white bred-pseudo rock group, does a couple of numbers to fill out the run time. It’s a nice break in the action for both the actors and the audience. I felt refreshed after their songs, fully prepared to return to watching people run around in masks. Frankenstein’s Daughter is misguided, 50s-sci-fi fun. There isn’t much to it, but it manages to entertain on a lot of levels.  

 

Frankenstein's Daughter - Monday, June 28th at 8:00 p.m.

It's MONDO MONDAYS at The Loft, celebrating weird, wild and wonderful flicks from the Mondo side of the silver screen! Admission is only $2.00, and don't forget to check out our yummy "Mondo Munchies" snack bucket ... fill a cup for a buck!

Billups Allen's interest in writing began composing lyrics for the band Shoutbus and later for the band Corn on Macabre. Lyrical duties led to writing poetry and short stories. Several of his short stories were published in a book entitled Unfurnished published by Florida’s now defunct Schematics Records. Allen currently lives in Tucson, Arizona where he writes Cramhole comic zine, writes reviews for Razorcake Magazine and the Tucson Citizen. www.billupsallen.com

PSYCHO - Justyn Dillingham

"There is not an abundance of subtlety or the lately familiar Hitchcock bent toward significant and colorful scenery in this obviously low-budget job." The world came to disagree with Bosley Crowther, grand poobah of the New York Times's film section for 27 years -- a man whose stuffy pronouncements irritated Pauline Kael so much that she made fun of him on virtually every page of her first book -- on the subject of Hitchcock's "Psycho," long since enshrined as a masterpiece and a turning point in the history of movies. But in some ways Crowther wasn't wrong. Hitchcock deliberately eschewed both subtlety and prettiness in the film; it was meant to hit audiences with all the grace of a murderer's knife, and audiences in 1960 reacted as if the knife had come slashing right through the screen.

To explain why audiences found the film so shocking, it is useful to explain what they might have come to the theater expecting. In general, there are two types of Hitchcock films. In the first type, an innocent man falls into dangerous circumstances and must fight his way out. He is mistaken for someone else, or wrongly implicated in a crime. This was the basic plot of "The 39 Steps," "Saboteur," "Strangers on a Train," "The Wrong Man," "The Man Who Knew Too Much," and "North By Northwest." In the second type of film, a puzzle falls into the lap of an innocent protagonist, and he or (usually) she must solve it. This was the plot of "The Lady Vanishes," "Rebecca," "Suspicion," "Spellbound," "Shadow of a Doubt," "Vertigo," and "Rear Window." Only once did Hitchcock sharply deviate from this pattern in one of his great films. In "Psycho," the audience is placed in the role of the innocent protagonist, and everyone we see on the screen is guilty. The entire film is a set-up, and the joke is on us.

For years, Hitchcock had made a game of toying with the audience's sympathies. He particularly seemed to relish pushing the audience to identify with his villains, like Claude Rains's sad-sack Nazi war criminal in "Notorious," so put upon and deceived by the film's heroes. Another favorite trick was to make the hero seem unscrupulous or weird. Hitchcock's heroes quarrel with their fiancées, peer into strangers' windows and joke about murdering their ex-wives. Hitchcock had never gone so far as he did in "Psycho," however, and the elaborate game he played with the press to drape a curtain of mystery around the film -- his playful attempt to "spoil" the film in his famous trailer, his injunction that no one be admitted to the theater after the beginning -- suggest that he knew all too well what a dangerous film he had made. At one point we watch a character watch a car sinking into a swamp. The car suddenly stops sinking, and we tense up -- will it sink? It does, and we feel relieved, just like the character. Then we realize that we've been tricked into identifying, however momentarily, with a person most of us would never want to share a hotel room with, to say the last.

The film's dangerousness lay in the way Hitchcock broke one taboo after another, with the casualness of a kid popping a sheet of bubble wrap. The opening scene shows a couple -- obviously unmarried -- lounging in a bed in a rundown hotel room. Later, for the first time in Hollywood history, a toilet is seen flushing. And then -- well, if you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about. (I've avoided talking about the plot as much as I can, since it's my experience that while everyone kind of knows what "Psycho" is about, a surprising number of people have never seen it -- perhaps, unfortunately, because they think they already know what happens.) But these small violations of Hollywood convention prepare us for what comes next, when the film plunges us into subjects so startling we can't even imagine the characters in other Hitchcock films talking about them. Much of that shockingness has been lost, partly because the film achieved what it set out to do. It's often been said that Hitchcock was successful because knew just how far he could go without alarming the censors. In this film, Hitchcock did go too far, and he got away with it because "Psycho" was enormously successful. At one point he considered releasing the film without the approval of the censors; a few years later, the censors themselves were out of a job, in part because of what Hitchcock had achieved in "Psycho."

Hitchcock was famously impatient with explanations. He thought they got in the way of the suspense. (In "North By Northwest," we never find out exactly what kind of agent Cary Grant is supposed to be mistaken for, or what the villains are trying to accomplish.) So it's a little puzzling that he ends -- or almost ends -- "Psycho" with a long explanation of what we have just seen. Perhaps he felt that the film would be too overwhelming and disturbing without it. He must have taken heart from the film's success, for his next film, "The Birds," contains no explanation at all for what has happened. There is no "villain" except the universe itself, and that film ends where it does because there is simply nothing else to add. And just as "Psycho" ends, Hitchcock pulls one last trick -- in the long, sinister final shot-- that suggests that even that explanation, after all, is a little phony, and that perhaps there is no explaining what we have seen. After all, that nice young man wouldn't hurt a fly.

 Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" is playing at The Loft Cinema, Wednesday, June 23, at 7 p.m. 

Justyn Dillingham is a 2009 graduate of the University of Arizona. His favorite film is “A Taste of Honey” (1961).

LOFT STAFF SPOTLIGHT - Anthony

Name: Anthony Cutrone A.K.A Twan

LOFT Staff position: The popper of popcorn, the seller of tickets, the cleaner of theatres and the giver of love.

I have worked at THE LOFT since: 2008, after the summer of touring the west coast and being unemployed. Thank the stars for the LOFT!

I grew up in:  A house, but I was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona.

My birthday/age is: 02-02-1987, Groundhogs Day. 9lbs and beautiful. Thanks Mom and Dad! 

When I am not at THE LOFT I: Collect records, taste beers, chill with my cat Ripley A.K.A. Ripples, read (lame), watch movies, sleep, attend school, make films, dream of once again making music, roller blade, but usually I’m at THE LOFT. If I’m not working, I’m watching movies on the big screen.

I work at THE LOFT because: I am addicted to movies. It’s a serious condition, which there is no cure. It’s the best job and I work with the best people. It’s the best place in Tucson.

A few of my favorite films are: Jaws, The Thing (1981), Body Double, 400 Blows, Millers Crossing, The Conversation, Magnolia, Breathless, Mean Streets, Rififi, Memories of Murder, Hidden Fortress, Manhunter, Robocop, Taxi Driver, Eyes Wide Shut, Once Upon A Time in The West, Alien and Aliens, Terminator and T2, Thin Blue Line, Rear Window, Teen Wolf, Close Encounters, Star Wars Trilogy, Big Trouble in Little China, Let The Right One In, Blade Runner, Midnight Cowboy, Blue Velvet, City Lights, Z, Commando, Fright Night, The Brood, Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

My favorite directors are: Kubrick, Carpenter, Kurosawa, De Palma, Godard, Scorsese, Morris, Herzog, Coen Brothers, P.T. Anderson, Coppola, Bong Joon Ho, Cronenberg, Jean Pierre Melville, Mann, Tarantino, Polanski, Hitchcock, Spielberg, Paul Verhoven, William Friedkin, Sergio Leone, James Cameron, Lucio Fulci, Lynch.

My favorite LOFT experience was: Watching Fright Night at 3:00 A.M. during Scream O’Rama and when Mark Ibold, the bass player for Pavement and Sonic Youth came in to watch The Messenger.

My favorite thing about the Loft is: It’s a non-profit, the Beer, the staff, the movies, the regulars, the secret portal in the up stairs theatre and the feeling of being a part of something magical.

Make up your own question here:  If train A leaves Chicago traveling 100MPH and train B leaves New York traveling 150MPH and the distance between the two cites is 600 miles how far from New York will it be when the two trains meet?

To get in touch with me send me an email: whatawampeteris9@hotmail.com