Pulpetti: short reviews and articles on pulps and paperbacks, adventure, sleaze, hardboiled, noir, you name it. You can write to Juri Nummelin at juri.nummelin@gmail.com.
Evan Katz's Small Crimes (2017) is an excellent neo-noir film after Dave Zeltserman's novel of the same name. Nicolaj Coster-Waldau plays Joe Denton, an ex-cop who's been six years in jail for maiming the D.A. with a knife. In the beginning of the film, we see him get out and try to redeem his bad deeds and getting in touch with his two daughters. We see him getting mixed up with his old colleagues in crime, both cops and criminals, we see him being asked to do some favours, we see him getting trapped. There's no escaping the past. Whatever Joe does, it only tightens the rope around his neck. Near the end, it seems he's getting out - but that impression doesn't last for long. This is noir at its noirest, and there are no mystic serial killers or any of that Nordic Noir shit around. What I especially liked about the film is that there's no back story, you have to be alert to see what's been happening. Small Crimes is available in Netflix.
Had the crime paperback series I was editing for a Finnish publisher six or seven years ago, I would've definitely included Zeltserman's novel in the series. I would've also picked up Zeltserman's Killer, which is even better, if you ask me. Both books come highly recommended.
I hope there are more Overlooked Films coming to Todd Mason's blog here.
Just announcing I'm not dead yet, though the latest blog post is from, what, two months back! Can this really be? Time flies really fast, doesn't it?
There have been things going on around here, that's for sure.
I ran for the city council here in Turku, Finland, in the ranks of the Left Alliance and was elected, almost to my surprise, vice member (or deputy member, I'm not really sure what the right word is). So far, I haven't done much in this official post, but we'll see.
My publishing house, Helmivyö, has put out new books. One of them is my own "The Short Introduction to Trash/Pulpy Literature" (Roskakirjallisuuden lyhyt historia; it's a tour around the world, focusing mainly on the United States), and one of them is a volume of the the collected short fiction of Kaarlo Bergbom, Finnish writer from the 1860s. There are only four stories, one of them being a Biblical fantasy, one being an almost Westernish story of an old career criminal living as a hermit, and two being psychological short stories. You can check the books out here. (The site is understandably in Finnish.)
My hands have been full of work, and besides all of the above I've been writing and compiling my own books. I had to postpone one that was supposed to come out next Fall, but the book about the film versions of classic and new Finnish literature is still in the works. It's a sequel to the book I wrote earlier, about film versions of known and forgotten books around the world, not only in Finland.
And there will also be a collection of fairy tales for adults I edited. It's called "The Hundred Years of Sleep" (or "Dreams"; Sadan vuoden unet in Finnish), according to the shorty story of Johanna Venho that was simply wonderful. I wish someone possibly in the publishing business reading this blog would get excited and ask for a translation sample of some of the stories. Check out the cover above, it's by Charlie Bowater.
I haven't been reading much hardboiled/noir/pulp/sleaze literature, as I have been deeply immersed in my work, but here's hoping I can squeeze some in during the Summer. So far, it looks bad...
I stumbled on this Shell-produced documentary almost by accident: I've been preparing a book that collects the writings of the Turku-based film critic Tapani Maskula (a Finnish legend), and reading some of his reviews from the sixties I noticed that he said nice things about a short subject that was shown before a longer movie (I believe it was The Hallelujah Trail). The short film was called Shellarama, and it was supposed to be shown in 70 mm (in Cinerama, to be exact), but there haven't been any 70 mm projectors in Turku, so it must've been shown here in 35 mm.
As the title suggests, Shellarama is, to quote the film's IMDb entry, "a celebration of Shell Petroleum, tracing its manufacture from discovery in oil fields to its eventual use as fuel for modern living across the globe". The film contains lots of breath-taking aerial shots with long camera drives over deserts and jungles, and it's fascinating to watch. Here's BFI on the film, I believe they have released the film - and some other 70 mm short films - on DVD or Blu-Ray.
Shellarama is available via YouTube in its entirety, albeit not with a very good quality, but it's still worth your while. As I watched it, I got to thinking the film reminded me of a much later film, Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi from the early eighties. Both films are without dialogue or voice-over narration, and both films are structured rather similarly, as both start from nature and continue on to big cities and their car jams. Both films contain similar shots of industrial enviroments and cities. Both films use people almost only as backdrops. Of course the ideology between the two films couldn't be more different: Shellarama praises Shell and oil that is used to promote modern life, while Koyaanisqatsi criticizes the modern life and the turmoil it brings to Earth. The music in the films couldn't also be more different from each other, as Koyaanisqatsi uses Philip Glass's minimalist soundtrack and Shellarama has some Latin percussion.
It's still entirely possible Godfrey Reggio was influenced by Shellarama. If he wasn't, I'm surprised!
But take a look and see for yourselves. Looks like Blogger crops the embedded clip, here's the direct link to YouTube. (More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog.)
I don't recall anymore when or where I first heard of Penelope Spheeris's film Suburbia (1983). It must've been an old Finnish music magazine, I had a bunch of those in the late eighties and I used to peruse them. Now I had finally a chance to see the film, and I saw it on big screen, which, I'm sure you know, is the option I prefer. The film seems to be out on DVD, and it was released on VHS in Finland thirty years ago, but I've never seen it anywhere.
Suburbia tells about a bunch of homeless teenagers, who have crashed an abandoned suburban house and live there all by themselves, sometimes stealing stuff from garages, sometimes going to punk concerts. It's a touching tragedy, with genuine heart-felt empathy for the kids, even though they are also shown to be jerks, racists or homophobes. One of them is a junkie, and his stuff leads to an overdose of another teenager. The teenagers are harassed by a duo of rednecks with guns, and their action leads to a needless death of a young boy. The movie ends in pessimistic notes.
The film has some great scenes at punk gigs, with bands like DI, T.S.O.L. and The Vandals (see above) giving their frantic best. The gigs are a mess, with young punks running and jumping and crashing on each other in mid-air. Some of the gigs end up violently, with the youngsters ripping off clothes from a young woman who's clearly in a wrong place, or some rednecks crashing the party with knives. It's not a pretty sight, even though Penelope Spheeris clearly knew what she was doing, since she had already made the punk rock documentary The Decline of Western Civilization (which I haven't seen).
Suburbia has lots of poignant shots about the desolate sites of Southern California. It was already like this over thirty years ago, even though the eighties was supposed to have been the decade of fortune and fame for everyone. In the beginning, we also see shots of wild dogs running rampant in the midst of abandoned houses, and it's a captivating sight. I don't know many American films that show this kind of societal decay - well, there have been some newer ones, like Killing Them Softly or Nebraska, but they are new. And then there's of course The Grapes of Wrath by John Ford. Spheeris was onto something here.
Suburbia was produced by Roger Corman, and it shows in some scenes of mild nudity and fist fights. Some of them are longer than they'd have to be. Corman had earlier made films about teenager sub-cultures, like The Wild Angels, and I'm sure he saw something similar in Suburbia and in the punk rock scene. Yet, Suburbia is just not another schlock film, it's a serious look at how teenagers are treated in American society. It's sometimes clichéd or badly acted (all the actors are amateurs, some of them are punk rockers from different bands), but it's very sincere and shows that the writer-director knew what she was doing. It's a small miracle Spheeris has since done films like The Beverly Hillbillies (1993), which admittedly I haven't seen. Wayne's World, her famous film, shows some of the flair for the rock'n'roll scene that's evident in Suburbia, but it's only a harmless comedy compared to the earlier film.
Spheeris started out in the 1960's doing some experimental and underground films, when she was a student at UCLA. I had a chance to see some of her early films last year at the Tampere Short Film Festival here in Finland. I didn't write anything about them at the time and my memories of the films are a bit dim, but here goes nevertheless.
Synthesis, Spheeris's first film from 1968, was an ordinary experimental film, unlike any other film she's done (to my knowledge). Bath (1969) is a short film that shows a woman masturbating taking a bath. It's a sensual film, not really shocking, but still possibly one of the first films showing a woman masturbating all by herself, without a man or without the film being porn. I Don't Know (1970) is a 20-minute film about the relationship between a lesbian woman and a transsexual man, and Spheeris depicts them warmly, without any patronizing or shocking revelations. The National Rehabilitation Center (1972) is a mockumentary about concentration camps aimed for possible subversives. It really looks like a mediocre newsreel or educational film, but isn't. There were also films called Shit, Hats Off to Hollywood, and No Use Walkin' When You Can Stroll, but I don't remember much of them. Here's more on Spheeris's early films and their restorations.
I don't think anyone with sane mind would be able to say that William Friedkin's The French Connection is an overlooked movie. It's a classic crime film, and it's a classic in its own right. Everyone knows the hectic chase scenes, everyone knows Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle, the narc cop prone to violence.
But you should see the film on big screen. I'd seen the film I think twice before yesterday, but now I had the chance to see it projected on silver screen from 35 mm print. The print was faded and scratchy, but boy, did the movie deliver! All the cinematic stuff in The French Connection was designed to work on the big screen, not on television. I remember that I had really not liked the film when I saw it earlier, but now I realized it was because of the wrong media. Friedkin uses lots of pans and zooms that don't work well in television. There are few close-ups, so we don't really get inside the characters. It's more like a documentary we are watching, even though it's a very entertaining and exciting documentary.
The soundtrack by jazz trumpetist Don Ellis is also great. I like the way Friedkin uses music and other sounds in the film, mixing them rather freely with each other.
I'd never heard about Andy Straka before, but I snatched his PI novel A Witness Above from the Brash Books newsletter, when it was free for a limited time. I read the book on my cell phone, which worked just fine.
A Witness Above stars Straka's private eye protagonist Frank Pavlicek, who's a former cop, fired from duty after shooting down a black kid, thinking the kid was armed. Pavlicek has retired from New York to his old haunts in Virginia. As he's training his hawk (something Straka seems himself to do), he stumbles upon a dead man, who seems to have a connection with Pavlicek's daughter. Soon Pavlicek gets a call of help from his daughter.
A Witness Above is a fluent, if not spectacularly original read. If you like hardboiled private eye novels, this should work for you. Straka's style is straight-forward and not overtly wordy, which at times suits me just fine. A Witness Above worked very well on the small screen of my phone. This is something one could read on a plane or in a train.
As some of may remember, I have some interest in experimental poetry. I've done a collection of e-mail spam poetry that is still available (check it out here), and I've also done some very small booklets of other spam-related or found stuff.
Now there's a new book of experimental poetry out. It's called velernic syoke mulnec, and it's a collection of word verification words that were once used in blogs and other sites that required some sort of notification you're not a bot. So, a machine wanted to know whether we are humans. There's irony in that, to be sure.
velernic syoke mulnec is a part of the "pwoermd" movement (if there indeed is a movement), poems that include only one word. The words in velernic syoke mulnec are fictitious (unless by accident there are some bona fide words included), which also is ironic in itself. There's also a preface (two, actually), and it's in English.
These word verification words seem no longer to be in use, so the collection has already become a historical text, an archive, one might say. The bulk of it was collected by me and some other folks in the end of the first decade of the 2000's, and there was also a publisher, but for some reason or another it never came out. Now I decided to put it out as an e-book, and it will be free for some time now. So go grab it, if you're interested in this type of thing. The book is available also through Kobo. Amazon's preview option might also satisfy your interest.
Here's a new article on Finnish film-maker Teuvo Tulio on the AV Club's site. Short quote: "In the pantheon of unclassifiable filmmakers, there is a special place for Teuvo Tulio, Finland’s king of shameless melodrama. A fetishist, an outsider artist of 1940s and ’50s film, he was outrageous, incapable of subtlety, rising to a higher plane of camp—beyond Ken Russell, beyond Nicolas Cage doing an accent, beyond Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls."
I've mentioned Tulio at least twice on this blog, here and here.
I was going to do this as a part of the Friday's Forgotten Book series, but then I realized it's not Friday, it's Tuesday, and I should be writing about an Overlooked Film! Well, here goes nevertheless.
I had bad luck selecting my readings for this past holiday season. I read three books that had nothing to do with my other work, but the first two proved to be pretty bland (won't name any names, though). Luckily the third one I picked to read proved to entertaining and exciting. I'd never read Dan Simmons earlier, but I might try another one by him, as Summer of Night was quite good.
Summer of Night is at times a nostalgic look at the small town life in Illinois in the early 1960's. The evil in the book is an old, empty school that seems to nourish a secret or a bunch of them. In the beginning we see a nosy kid getting sucked up in a tunnel in the boys' room, and everything starts to unravel as the main characters, a bunch of kids, start to search for the explanation. There are references to Aleister Crowley and other esoteric stuff, but Simmons has enough style to keep the lecturing away. The book is quite long, which I usually don't like, but this kept me turning pages.
Simmons also clearly has sympathy for the underdog: his heroes are a dyslexic boy who proves to be the cleverest of them all, a dreamy boy who fantasizes about being a writer, a misanthropic kid who hates his out-going mother (I thought the description of the mother was a bit unfair, but it remained believable throughout), and an ugly and ill-kept girl who likes to carry a shotgun around. There's warmth also in the depiction of the somewhat loserish parents. There are lots of exciting scenes, but the long climax was also very good.
Summer of Night came out in 1992 and was nominated for a British Fantasy Award the same year. There have been sequels, but I haven't read any of them. When I was still picking up books for the Arktinen Banaani's paperback line some years ago, I considered Simmons's hardboiled crime novels, Hardcase, Hard Freeze, and Hard as Nails, but I never got around to reading them. His science fiction novels have been popular in Finland, so it might've been worth the effort.
The Finnish cover depicted above is ugly as all hell, it's no wonder this didn't make much impact here. The Finnish title translates back as "The Horror of the Summer Night". I notice now that one of the sequels, namely Children of the Night, has also been translated in Finnish as well - will have to look for it.
As I wrote in my earlier post, I have a new book out. It's a collection of articles and essays on different kinds of genre and pulp fiction, and there's also one on sports fiction. This essay I wrote specifically for the book, since I ordered John Dinan's book on the subject years ago, called Sports in the Pulp Magazines, thinking I could compile a small fictionmag around some pulp short stories, but to this day I haven't been able to come up with anything. I read the book and wrote the article, and now it's in the book. Since the book is in Finnish, here are some words on it in English. I'll try to keep this short, but we'll see how that comes about.
The first pulp magazines were of the general variety, but in the 1920's they started to specialize in certain genres. Sports were also beginning to get more professional at the same time, and the first sports celebrities, such as Jack Johnson, emerged. So some pulp magazine publishers started to publish magazines publishing only sports material, not only fiction, but also columns, interviews, biographies, stuff that resembles more sports journalism than what we usually associate with pulp magazines. The first sports pulp magazine was Sport Story Magazine, published by Street & Smith, one of the biggest pulp publishers. The first issue came out in 1923. The second sports pulp was Fight Stories, that started appearing in 1928. It specialized in boxing stories.
In the 1930's and especially after the Berlin Olympics there started to be more sports pulps, as the American readers were enthusiastic about the American athletes winning the games. In 1936 three more magazines were born: Ace Sports, Thrilling Sports, and Star Sports Magazine, and the next year saw eleven more. Some more came later in 1938 and 1939. The Second World War caused difficulties for the pulp mags and their publishers, but after the war there were more new magazines, but not so many as before the war. John Dinan points out interestingly that some of the pulp publishers also had a hand in organizing the sports leagues, such as Gerald Smith of Street & Smith. He was one of the founders of the All-American Football Conference that was supposed to compete with NFL.
Some of the sports pulps survived till the fifties, and the last ones were published as late as 1957. Some of the later mags include Ten Story Sports and Super Sports.
John Dinan has counted the number of different sports in Street & Smith's Sport Story Magazine. The results are not very surprising: the most popular sports were football, fighting and baseball, with basketball probably the fourth. Tennis, golf, track & field and ice hockey were also popular, but none of them had their own titles like the more popular disciplines, though the basketball titles weren't successful.
Dinan lists some of the better known sports authors, such as Robert Sidney Bowen and William Campbell Gault. He lists also some authors known for their work in other genres who also dabbled in sports fiction, such as Max Brand, Johnston McCulley and Stephen Marlowe. He also writes quite widely about Robert E. Howard's Dennis Dorgan stories. There were also sports writers who wrote non-fiction for the pulps, such as Jack Kofoed. Dinan seems to have read some of the stories of these writers, but on some others he relies on other sources.
Dinan's book on the subject has lots of fascinating information, but it's not organized very well. I don't know why Dinan has decided to list some of the best known sports novels that have nothing to do with the pulp magazines, and he also claims Paul Gallico was a pulp writer, though most of his stuff came out in the slicks, such as Saturday Evening Post. Dinan's earlier work on the history of the pulp magazines, The Pulp Western, was riddled with errors and an assumption that the pulp mags were aimed for young readers, but Sports in the Pulp Magazines seems more solid in that regard. I didn't check all the details, but you can check some of the facts yourself here at the sports pulp magazine section of the Galactic Central/Fictionmags Index site.
I said at the beginning of this post that I've been thinking about compiling and publishing a sports fiction mag myself. I once had a permission to use one of Stephen Marlowe's sports stories (there weren't many to begin with), but I couldn't get my hand on them. (And then Marlowe died.) Now I have a permission to use a Robert Silverberg story (he wrote a handful in the late fifties, mainly on baseball), but I don't have any! If someone sees this and can send me a xerox or a scan or even a digital photo of a Silverbob sport story, I'd be a happy man! Interim, I've decided to compile an anthology of old Finnish sports stories, as I've come across quite a many while doing some other research on Finnish fictionmags.
More Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott's blog here. Happy Holidays to each and everyone!
As you may well remember, I founded a publishing house a couple months ago. A new batch of books just arrived, alas
somewhat too late for the Yuletide.
The three books are a mixed bunch, as befits me and my eclectic tastes. The first one was a reprint of the first tragedy ever wrote in Finnish language, namely Ruunulinna by J. F. Lagervall (1834). It's a free translation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, situated in Karelia (a region in Eastern Finland) and told in trochaic tetrameter, the same meter as Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. It really doesn't work as literature and it's a curio at best, but I noticed it's never been reprinted as a book, so I thought I'd give it a shot. The play is accompanied by a 100-year old treatise on Lagervall, the author.
I also published a vintage Christmas book my wife Elina Teerijoki wrote - she couldn't find a publisher for the book, which baffled the both of us, and I said "okay, I'll publish it". It's been a small hit and could've been bigger if it had been published by a bigger publisher. The book is filled with beautiful photos our mutual friend took, and there are also lots of old ads and other vintage stuff. Elina maintains her vintage blog here.
My own book is called Kovaa kyytiä ja kaunokaisia ("Rough Ride and Beauties"), which is the original Finnish title of the Buster Keaton film, Sherlock Jr. It's a collection of my writings on pulp and other genre literature, compiled from prefaces, essays and articles on crime, western, horror, fantasy and erotic writing, with some stuff on science fiction (a genre I've never written much about), sports fiction, aviation pulps, and movie and comic/graphic novel novelizations. There's also a section on Edgar Rice Burroughs, and also some profiles of authors, i.e. Harry Whittington, Carroll John Daly and others.
I'm sure my book would be of interest to many Pulpetti followers, but it's only in Finnish. I'm open to negotiations, though...
Huge thanks to J.T. Lindroos who did the covers for my book and Ruunulinna! He also helped me out with other technical problems.
Helmivyö's books are solely print-on-demand (though we took a small print run of my wife's Christmas book to sell from hand to hand), and it seems the cheapest place to get them is via the Booky.fi bookstore.
The Greasy Strangler, the first feature film by Jim Hosking, is something else entirely: it's a horror-comedy about a serial killer, but the serial killer is an old man living with his nerdy son, not some mastermind criminal. The old man also has a huge cock and he dresses up in grease. In one scene he dives into a barrel full of axle grease or some such goo, and in his outfit he looks absoteluly disgusting. The nerdy son starts to suspect something fishy is going on, but the story has some surprising twists, some of them being really surprising. The film is accompanied by a really irritating synthesizer soundtrack, which adds to the overall feeling.
Disgust is the film's main feeling, or repulsion. The film is yucky all the way. Still it's very funny throughout. There are lots of details I just can't explain in writing, as you wouldn't believe them. I don't know how easily this independent film can be seen, but I recommend you try. This is a film you really can call unpredictable.
You've seen Plan 9 from Outer Space? You thought it was the worst movie of all time? You ain't seen half of it, there are films that are infinitely worse than Ed Wood's turkey.
The worst part of Plan 9 is that is so slow and boring, mainly just dead people staring at something and walking all too slowly. Where's the action, where's the goofiness? Both are found in large quantities in the Italian space opera Starcrash (1978), directed with hysterical gusto by Luigi Cozzi, using the American-sounding pseudonym Lewis Coates. You want action? Here's action for you. Lots of babes in scantily-clad suits? Check. Uninterested extras parading around? Check. Badly-made spaceships? Check. Red, orange, blue and green planets filling the space? Check. Flat-out weird psychedelic monsters? Check. Stupid one liners? Check. Robot talking with Southern accent? Check. Incomprehensible space battle scenes? Check. Totally goofy last-minute savings by far-out machinery? Check. David Hasselhoff in an early role? Check. Christopher Plummer looking dazed out and giving bad monologues eyes half-closed? Check. Joe Spinell raving about being the emperor of the universe? Check.
This film has got it all. It's entertaining all the way, everything goes ahead with full speed, and the dialogue just keeps giving you shiny examples of humane wit. Most highly recommended.
I don't know if anyone's collecting these posts nowadays, but I thought I'd use the moniker nevertheless. Do check out Todd Mason's blog, he used to collect them earlier.
I haven't been blogging and I realized why that was. Even though Pulpetti has for years mainly focused on crime fiction in its many forms, I realized I can't go on pretending nothing happened.
You know, I've been devastated. I know now that there were many flaws with Hillary Clinton's campaign, and I hoped Bernie Sanders would've been the Democrat candidate. I don't know whether he'd been able to defeat Trump, but it still would've been the same, right? And maybe Sanders could've set something else entirely in motion. (There's still that Clinton got more votes than Trump. She was more popular. Maybe the Americans should do something about how the votes are counted.)
But Trump? I can't begin to understand what went on here. You would've thought his story would've ended during many points of his career, like when he made condescending remarks about a journalist with a handicap. C'mon, you let this guy run your country?! Okay, I've read lots and lots of reports and articles about how bad things are for the American middleman, but this is still no excuse to vote someone who runs on racism, hatred and bigotry. (Not to mention the notion that also the rich voted for Trump. They are the real ones who benefit from Trump and his politics.) Lots of people have been trying to be moderate and saying that maybe Trump will not go with what he said during his campaign, but however his campaign and his victory made hate speech and vitriolic racism more acceptable.
And it made it more acceptable not only in the US, but all over the world. There's been a lot of racist backlash in Europe and Russia, and I'm beginning to fear we are not seeing the end of it. Talks about building a wall on the Mexican border (which sounded only absurd at first) don't much differ from talks about building camps for special people.
"It couldn't happen here." That was the title of Sinclair Lewis's novel of the rise of the American fascist. That's what they said about Hitler as well.
PS. I don't even want to think what this might mean for Putin's Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe and Middle-Asia.
Dennis Hauck's first feature-length film is Too Late that premiered earlier this year. It's an exceptional film, filmed on 35 mm film and shown only on film. I don't know if there will be a DVD or Blu-Ray later on or if the film will be available on streaming sites, but I guess not. (Oh, it's available on iTunes.)
I was lucky to have the opportunity to see the film last week. While Too Late is not a masterpiece, it's an interesting film in its own right, while it's also an interesting experiment, as it consists only of five shots, each 20 minute long. (The length of a film reel.) This is not done actually very consistently, as there are some scenes with split screens, and there are some edits in the end, but all in all Too Late is a marvelous technical experiment.
Too Late is also a crime film, a neo-noir, if you will. John Hawkes is very good playing a private detective getting caught up in his own past, and there are some other known actors in small roles, like Robert Forster, Jeff Fahey (whom I didn't recognize), Joanna Cassidy and some others. The story is about a stripper working at a seedy club and getting to know some intimate secrets of the owner - or is it...? It's a bit like David Lynch and also a bit like Quentin Tarantino and his Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs: the story moves back and forth in time and you have to be careful to really understand what's going on.
The major problem with the film is that it's too talkative. The 20-minute shots get caught up in people talking, and nothing much happens on screen. There's also the familiar problem with many experimental movies: you don't really invest much interest in these people. It's more a like game, though the surprise twist in end feels more touching than anything else in the film.
Still, Too Late is a very worthwhile film and if you have the opportunity, check it out.
More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog. (I hope there will be more Films.)
I can't resist buying stuff like this I find on thrift stores and other places: cheap VHS cassettes with movies that probably have never been released on DVD or don't show up on TV. LBJ: The Early Years cost me 20 cents a year ago, and I finally watched it. As it's pretty long (almost 3 hours) it took me many days to watch. The series was published on video cassette in Finnish in 1989 with the title Vallan huipulla ("Top of the Power" or some such).
LBJ: The Early Years is a solid work from director Peter Werner who's had a pretty long career on TV. For some reason, the screen writer of the mini-series isn't said anywhere, not in the credits nor in IMDb. I don't know why, certainly there's no reason for anyone to hide. LBJ: The Early Years starts from the fifties, with Johnson working in the senate, but not yet being a senator. The series follows his career in politics from running for senate and later for vice-presidency. The climax is of course the assassination of John F. Kennedy on which no time is wasted. The murder is not shown, the series focuses on the aftermath of the assassination. The series doesn't go into LBJ's actual presidency.
I'm no expert on the US history, but the mini-series seems trustworthy on many themes, like the relationship between the Kennedys and Johnson. As the series is not about LBJ's presidency, it doesn't deal with the war in Vietnam, so it can dust off the more difficult issues.
The best thing about LBJ: The Early Years is the lead actor. Randy Quaid makes a believable and likable Johnson, with all his quirks, Texas drawl and sudden changes in mood. Quaid is full of energy, when need be, but he's very good also portraying Johnson's depression. There are many good actors in the small roles: Kevin McCarthy, Pat Hingle, R. G. Armstrong, Barry Corbin, Royal Dano, Frances Conroy... In the narration are included several newsreels, which are used to a good effect.
I don't know if this is regularly shown on American TV, but it could very well be.
More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog here (when they show up).
Just noticed that Ed Gorman passed away. It's a damn shame, I'm sure there were more books in him. His work as a novelist, short story writer and anthologist has been great and revered by many.
As far as I know, I'm responsible for the only two Finnish translations of Gorman's work. I published two of his short stories, both of which were excellent. The first one to come out was "Layover", a thoughtful and melancholy look at people who got tangled up in crime. It was first published in my fanzine, Isku, and then it came out in Kaikki valehtelevat/Everybody Lies, the anthology of short stories that were published in my crime fiction fanzines. Then came "Scream Queen", another melancholy story, this time about some nerdy guys working in a video store and meeting the idol of their teenage years, the actor of many slasher films. It was published as a small pamphlet, with a limited print run and with Aapo Kukko's great cover illustration.
May Ed Gorman rest in peace. I know there are many people who miss him - my condolences to them. I never met him, but would've sure liked to.
As everyone by now knows, Bob Dylan got the Nobel prize for literature earlier today. Now, I've never really understood why people like him and his music so much. To me his music always been a bit boring and at times obnoxious, and it's not just about his singing voice. I have a strong taste for more rhythm and more vigorous beats, and you have to admit there's not much of those in Dylan's music. I have found his orchestrations noisy and incoherent, and it's something I don't like in Bruce Springsteen either. The Big Sound just escapes me. I like it when The Byrds made "Mr. Tambourine Man" into a jingly-jangly pop song.
My ex-girlfriend and the mother of my first child is a great Dylan fan. She had to have everything Dylan ever did. You can easily see this caused some difficulties between her and me - our tastes in music were too different. This wasn't the cause for us breaking up apart, but it had something to do with it. It has also cast a shadow over me and my relationship with Dylan's music. Still, whatever I do, I just can't get the taste of it.
Of course, Dylan got his Nobel prize for his lyrics, not his music. In rock music, though, they are inseparable, but as for me, I've never really cared for listening to the lyrics. I don't really know why this is - maybe it's because it reminds me of my work, reading and writing, and I want music to be something else entirely.
There are some exceptions to my views of Dylan. I like Dylan without a noisy band, like for example here.
The renowned Polish director's first feature-length film was this small-scale film - only three actors - that reflects his familiar themes of humiliation and its bond with erotics, sex and love.
Knife in the Water tells about a well-to-do couple (in communist Poland, no less) that picks up a hitcher, a young innocent guy who's got nothing to do with his life. They ask him to accompany them in a boat. The result is - almost - deadly, as tensions rise between the two men and the young woman. This is an intense little film, with a noirish jazz soundtrack by Krzysztof Komeda, well worth seeing and hearing. There are some breath-taking scenes throughout, as Polanski and his photographer Jerzy Lipman move the camera around the small sailing boat.
Evan Katz's Small Crimes (2017) is an excellent neo-noir film after Dave Zeltserman's novel of the same name. Nicolaj Coster-Waldau plays Joe Denton, an ex-cop who's been six years in jail for maiming the D.A. with a knife. In the beginning of the film, we see him get out and try to redeem his bad deeds and getting in touch with his two daughters. We see him getting mixed up with his old colleagues in crime, both cops and criminals, we see him being asked to do some favours, we see him getting trapped. There's no escaping the past. Whatever Joe does, it only tightens the rope around his neck. Near the end, it seems he's getting out - but that impression doesn't last for long. This is noir at its noirest, and there are no mystic serial killers or any of that Nordic Noir shit around. What I especially liked about the film is that there's no back story, you have to be alert to see what's been happening.
