Month: April 2022

Richard Linklater‘s Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (Netflix) is a plotless boomer nostalgia thing — a visit to the oasis of suburban family life in the mid to late ’60s and a re-sampling of all the pop cultural stuff of that era (late LBJ, early Nixon).

Like Linklater’s Waking Life (’01) and A Scanner Darkly (’06), Apollo 10 and 1/2 is rotoscoped — the only kind of animation I really enjoy. Performed by skilled actors and then converted to subtle, ultra-realistic animation.

It’s set in a bland Houston suburb, and is oriented to some extent around NASA and the July 1969 Apollo moon voyage. It’s about a Brady Bunch or Wonder Years-type family, of which Stan (voiced by Milo Coy) is the young lead protagonist. Dad (Bill Wise) works in shipping and receiving for NASA. It’s narrated by an off-screen Jack Black, playing an adult Milo. There’s a mom, an older brother plus two or three sisters.

Apollo 10 and 1/2 is an easy-going, laid-back time machine. Boomers and older GenXers will sink right in — it’s an amiable return to their young lives and everything that was happening in terms of music, TV, cultural changes, the Vietnam War, racial conflict, evolving sexual mores, etc.

I had a nice mellow time with it.

The only problem is that Linklater’s time trip has no POCs. If I were Jon Stewart or Race2Dinner’s Lisa Bond I would say that this absence reflects a foul racist agenda on Linklater’s part, and that he has to be lashed along with all the other white animators who’ve committed similar crimes.

To those who would say “but Linklater based it on his own childhood to some extent and it’s set in a ’60s whitebread neighborhood…there were no kids of color in this neck of the woods back then,” I would say “have you never heard of presentism? It doesn’t matter if there were no black kids in Linklater’s old neighborhood — this is 2022 and he should’ve blacked it up.”

I’ll tell you what I did last night while watching Apollo 10 1/2. I ignored the whole doofus fantasy subplot about the 14 year-old Stan being selected by NASA engineers to go on a secret Apollo mission, blah blah. I watched it, yes, but I didn’t give a damn. It bypassed my aesthetic digestive system entirely.

I was totally stone-faced throughout 95% of last night’s SNL, but then “Short-Ass Movies” came on…okay! I sat up, I woke up, the color returned to my cheeks, etc. Yes, being a short-ass movie hound means a moronic “no” to Heat, Barry Lyndon, Schindlers List, The Godfather (Parts I and II), Prince of the City, Malcolm X, Lawrence of Arabia, Malcom X, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman, Spartacus and dozens of others, but compared to last night’s other skits, “Short-Ass Movies” was the shit.

For the last few weeks we’ve all been watching video coverage of the Ukraine carnage, and in just about every clip I’ve noticed there are almost no large trees in that country. There are occasional glimpses of modest forests and scrub-brush regions that surround dull brutalist apartment and office buildings. Yes, the 19th Century architecture in the old section of downtown Kyiv is handsome and baroque, but the outlying areas are mostly flat fields, flat fields and more flat fields. And I keep asking myself, “Jesus, is there some kind of law against big trees in Ukraine?” There are hundreds of magnificent oak trees on both sides of Rome’s Tiber, and when you walk under them they make you feel that all is right with the world.

Yeah, I know…Mort who?

It’s been asserted for years by people seemingly in the know that the actual composer of the famously eerie Invaders From Mars score is not Raoul Kraushar, as I’ve stated a few times on HE, but longtime Republic Pictures composer Mort Glickman.

Reporting has it that Kraushar was a Hans Zimmer-like operator and compiler who would hire guys to ghost-write scores, which Kraushar would then take credit for.

I’ve been persuaded that the claims about Glickman may have merit. Okay, that they’re probably legit.

I am therefore apologizing if in fact (as it appears) I have passed along bad intel. Kraushar was apparently not the Invaders From Mars composer, and I apologize for previously failing to report that Glickman, a stocky, bespectacled guy who looked like a 1950s grocery-store clerk and could have played a behind-the-counter colleague of Ernest Borgnine‘s in Marty…Glickman was the maestro!

Three people have made the case — (1) David Schecter, co-producer of Monstrous Movie Music, a “series of re-recordings which feature a wealth of classic music from many of everyone’s favorite science fiction, horror and fantasy films”, (2) Janne Wass in a 2016 article for scifist.wordpress.com, and (3) William H. Rosar, author of a 1986 CinemaScore article titled “The Music for Invaders From Mars.”

Rosar excerpt: “Credited to Raoul Krau­shaar, a Paris-born composer who was educated in the United States and began working in films in 1928 as a musical assistant and later music director, the music for Invaders From Mars has frequently been singled out as one of the best 1950s science fiction film scores, its eerie choral arrange­ments and bleak aca­pella ‘conjuring up visions of a dying Mar­tian land­scape or the wailing of fright­ened minds in hell,’ as one reviewer wrote.

“Recently, however, it has come to light through several reliable sources that Krau­shar may not have scored Invaders From Mars at all, but instead only conducted it, the score having been written instead by Mort Glickman, a con­tracted ghost writer.”

The first heads-up came from Schecter, who wrote the following in a 3.31.22 HE comment thread about the restored, soon-to-premiere Invaders From Mars:

“Raoul Kraushaar couldn’t compose his way out of a paper bag. I work in the film music industry and am considered one of the experts in classic sci-fi and horror music. I even spoke to Raoul, who was very good at ‘skirting the issue.’ Kraushaar was notorious for using ghost-writers, and I knew some of the composers who wrote for him, including Bert Shefter (who wrote with Paul Sawtell).

“And all the composers back then knew that Kraushaar wasn’t a composer — he was a ‘compiler.’ It was legal to use ghost-writers, but that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t know the real story.

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A perverse billionaire seeks me out and say he’s a huge fan of Hollywood Elsewhere, and in return for the good writing and rich observations and recollections over the last 19 years he wants to do me a favor.

He offers me the option of living for free in a two-story, old-world villa in the Trastevere section of Rome — a place he’s owned for decades but never visits. He says I can stay there as long as I want. Which I like the sound of right away — easy travels to various top-tier European film festivals (Cannes, Venice, Berlin) plus I’ve always loved Rome, etc. I thank him and tell him the invitation is highly alluring.

However (here’s the catch) the billionaire insists that a massive blowup of the below emoji must hang on the living room wall, and can’t be taken down. He says it’ll be good for my soul, and will make me a kinder, gentler person. An employee of the billionaire will come to inspect the place randomly, he says, and if the emoji is ever removed I’ll be obliged to move out.

After thinking about living with this emoji I realize that billionaire is not just perverse but the devil himself. I reach out and thank him for his incredible generosity and good heart, but I politely decline the offer.

One of the finest HE posts ever, a little more than six years old and titled “Tear-Assing Down To Rome Under A Night of a Thousand Stars.” The best part is excerpt #2 [after the jump] — a parable about how to live and not live.

Jean Stein‘s “West of Eden: An American Place” is a great literary time trip about four Hollywood legends and an also-ran– Edward Doheny, Jack L. Warner, Jane Garland, Jennifer Jones and Jules Stein (i.e., Jean’s dad) — told through a series of oral-history passages. It’s a saga of the spirited, bent-out-of-shape Hollywood royals of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s — intimate tales of eccentricity, flamboyance and (putting it very mildly) curious, compulsive behavior.

I bought a copy during the Santa Barbara Film Festival but I’m only just getting around to reading it now. I’m passing along two excerpts from the Jennifer Jones chapter — both from the memory of Robert Walker, Jr., the son of Jones and actor Robert Walker (i.e., Bruno Antony in Strangers on a Train). Walker, Jr. (Stein refers to him as “Bob Walker) was the guy who said grace (a kind of prayer) during the hippie commune passage in Easy Rider.

Excerpt #1, about the 13-year-old Walker’s experience during the 1953 filming of John Huston‘s Beat The Devil, portions of which happened in Ravello, Italy, on the Amalfi Coast: “Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman were also down there to do a movie [i.e., Journey to Italy/Viaggio in Italia], not that many miles from us. At the time I was madly in love with Ingrid Bergman. At some point during a break in the filming, we all went to Capri for a few days, and she was with us. I remember her lying above the blue grotto in this beautiful, light blue bathing suit, and her blonde Swedish hair blowing in the wind. I thought she was a vision of loveliness.

“Then we were all in Naples and heading to Rome, probably to do some more work for the film. I remember Mother got into a limo, but [my younger brother] Michael and I ended up piling into Rossellini’s big Ferrari convertible. We all little goggles on, and those little cloth helmets that they used to wear to keep their hair in place. The Ferrari looked very racy and sporty and had a number on the side, I think. Rossellini was driving. He took off and must have been going 120 miles an hour to Rome. I must have been in some kind of hog heaven, little kid heaven.

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A day or two ago World Of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy posted results of his own “best of the ’70s” poll, fortified by the opinions of 150 critics, filmmakers and historians.

Francis Coppola’s The Godfather was #1, of course, but one of HE’s ’70s favorites — John Carpenter‘s Assault of Precinct 13 — was ignored by this crowd. And two legendary Hal Ashby films — Shampoo and Being There — were ranked below Dawn of the Dead….c’mon!

Jaws is not the fifth greatest motion picture of the ’70s…obviously crafty and impactful but it’s a popcorn film. And get Nashville out of the #7 slot (Larry Karaszewski disagrees!) and install The Long Goodbye in its place.

Four Coppola films cracked Ruimy’s top 10: The Godfather. The Godfather, Part II (#4), Apocalypse Now (#6) and The Conversation (#10).

Here’s my top 15 (previously posted):

1. The Godfather (’72), 2. The Godfather, Part II (’74). 3. The French Connection (’71), 4. All The Presidents Men (’76), 5. Assault on Precinct 13 (’76), 6. Network (’76), 7. Serpico (’73), 8. The Last Detail (’73), 9. Chinatown (’74), 10. The Hospital (’71), 11. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (’71), 12. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73), 13. Mean Streets (’73), 14. Days of Heaven (’78), 15. Annie Hall (’77).

“Best & Slightly Blemished ’70s Films“, posted on 2.18.22.

I believe in Ari Aster‘s Disappointment Blvd.. Partly (mostly?) because there’s something about that title. And I believe in the idea of it playing next month in Cannes, even if IndieWire‘s Eric Kohn is right (not ready**) and Jordan Ruimy is wrong (likely competition). Even if I suspect that it’ll disappoint or weird me out in some way. Even if this is a fan poster, which I presume it is.

** I was very upset when I read Kohn’s prediction riff, which is partly a wish-list thing.