A couple of quick Superman Reviews: Superman Family #3 and Superman #11

Superman Family Adventures #3
by Baltazar and Franco

The fact that this book isn't moving 80,000 copies per month is a crime.  Good-natured, action-packed, zany, bizarre and purely in love with the Superman mythos, this book is a perfect comic to hand a kid as well as your hipster pal looking for a good laugh.  If you're into a balanced diet in your comics, this is sort of the lovely pudding you should save to savor at the end of the buy pile.  Or something.

Signal Watch Review: Masks & Mobsters (from MonkeyBrain Comics)

One of the great things thus far about MonkeyBrain Comics has been the wide variety of genre content coming from the publisher.  Last week saw tweaky hipster/ swords & sorcery strip Wander hit the internets.  This week MonkeyBrain rolls out Masks & Mobsters, a book that's pretty well set on the Signal Watch Venn Diagram as it's crime/ gangster comics set in a 1930's-era urban center with wiseguys starting to feel the heat from mystery men with strange powers.

The book's title page promises that this will be less of a straight narrative, issue after issue, as it announces it's an anthology title (ie: a fresh story with each issue, I'm guessing), so we'll see where the creative team is taking it from here (or if the same creative team will even stay around).

Signal Watch Watches: The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

I'm considering this post a "first take" review.  I'm stating that now partially because I do plan to see the movie again in the theater (and likely many times in the future) and partially because I've already seen how this plays out for me trying to talk about a Nolan movie on the first go-round and pretending like I got everything.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) has a tremendous amount of territory to cover, and contains a terribly ambitious film that I think, did modern movies not get capped at 2.5 hours as a run-time, could easily have fleshed itself out a bit more and run an even 3 hours or longer.  The movie has the task of laying out it's own story, giving a conclusion that satisfactorily resolves character arcs and plot threads from prior films, and digging far deeper into the thematic elements of the prior movies.

From a content standpoint, of course it's a mishmash of the entire scope of this thing we call "Batman", with the movie seeming to borrow plot from a few different bat-sources, including Knightfall, Batman: The Cult, The Dark Knight Returns and from No Man's Land- stories from different Bat-eras and varying Bat-creators, and but all sharing central motifs of a lost city.  But, that said, Nolan has managed to very much craft a new story, making this final installment feel very much like a section or book within the book and less like an episode.

Signal Re-Watch: The Dark Knight (2008)

Friday evening pal JuanD brought over his dog, Levi, to join Jamie and I for our pre-Dark Knight Rises screening of The Dark Knight (2008).  I mention Juan not just because Juan is a terrific fellow, but because our post-screening discussion should really warrant him a co-writer credit on this post.

I'm not very fond of my original review of the movie from 2008, and was sharing with Juan how I was so rattled by the movie's very existence that it took a viewing or two more to begin to appreciate everything Nolan was trying to accomplish, and that, in many ways, the best way to watch these movies is to turn off everything I know about Batman (which is a lot, and runs near constantly as a background subroutine) and instead come at the film as if I weren't playing comics-fan-connect-the-dots.  At some point it may be more useful to start looking at the movie as employing archetypes to relate a fable of duality on an operatic scale.  Chaos vs. Order.  Liberty vs. Security.  Lies vs. Truth.  Personal Duty vs. Public Duty.

all that and a motorcycle that goes VROOOM!  VROOOOOOM!  VROOOOOOOOOOM!!!!

You can feel a great leap in the quality of the film from Batman Begins during the first scene of Dark Knight, and the decision to dump the studio backlot feel of the previous Gotham for the very real streets of Chicago shot in punchy, deep focus, free of the filters and mood enhancers that dominated the look of the first movie.  And it's that realism and stepping away from the comic page that seems to give the movie some it's immediacy and edge.  Gotham is Chicago in this film - lived in and real, not a set made to look dank.

Signal Watch Watches: The Third Man (1949)

First of all:  Nathan, I'm sorry.  You told me, and I just got lazy.  And now I have finally seen The Third Man (1949).

I've been intending to watch this movie since I saw Heavenly Creatures in the theater, but somehow it never happened.  That doesn't mean I haven't seen Birdemic five times in the interim, and hopefully that informs why my new policies regarding movie watching are about trying to rectify some past sins of omission.

Suffice it to say, I throw myself at the mercy of the folks who would tut-tut me for having never seen this movie before.  I am sorry.  But I have now seen it.

So, I think last summer's "Oh my God" movie was The Hustler.  You hear the names of these movies, and you catch them, and if it's a 50 or 70 year old movie people are still discussing, there's usually a reason why the audience hasn't let the movie go like the hundreds of others that came out around the same time.  But, as with all narratives (or, perhaps, art...  a word I sort of balk at using around here because...  gnngh.), you can recognize quality without something necessarily fitting neatly in your wheelhouse not really resonating with you on a any personal level.  And those are things that are hard to quantify in discussing movies.

Movie Watch 2012: Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

"Well," as Jamie said as we pulled away from the theater, "That was most definitely a Wes Anderson movie."

I have a hard time criticizing directors or musicians for continuing to employ some of their trademarks in their work.  Anderson's barely-there dialog direction, the same four or five shots he uses over and over in a rhythmic pattern (usually punctuated with a particularly lovely and well framed surprising shot: think the kid in the pool in Rushmore).

Nor can you hold the fact that none of his narratives ever really see closure against him.  His are not movies that end with a wedding (well, maybe Royal Tenenbaums) but suggest that this is a particularly important juncture in the lives of many people: now let us observe.

If any of Anderson's affectations irritate you, you've been put on notice by his prior work, and this film is not for you.*  This is most definitely not the movie where he changes things up and goes for a Dogma 95 verite style.  If you're familiar with his work and somehow still keep paying to see it, then this may be a movie for you.  I'm fond of Anderson's aesthetic, which may have overwhelmed The Life Aquatic and, to a degree, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, but I appreciate that he's got his own thing going on.

In some ways, much as I wanted to grab 15-year-old me and take him to see Rushmore, I would have loved to have had 12 year old me in tow for this one.  It definitely understands the inevitability of a Lord of the Flies scenario when dealing with boys of that age, of how confusing and useless adults can seem (and how they have their own messes) and even the passion you might have applied to reading X-Men comics or scouting skills that you might also turn to a girl who actually pays you heed at that awful stage in life.  Imagine were love requited at that age...

The cast is better than I'd heard by word of mouth, and Tilda Swinton was typically amazing even in her small part.  But Jason Schwartzman's small role, no doubt written specifically for him, is pure gold.  The herd of child actors, especially the two leads, are pretty great.  And the moment of decision for the Khaki Scouts in their treehouse was the sort of monumental scene for kids that felt true, even in its ludicrousness.

In short, I enjoyed it.  No real surprises, even down to <spoiler> the needless death of a pet </spoiler>.  But it was a lovely film, and a nice bit of counter-programming to all the sci-fi and superhero stuff of the past year.  This I say with tickets bough to see Dark Knight Rises next Saturday.




*seriously, if I hear any of you tell me you didn't like anything since Royal Tenenbaums but you still went to see this and you're complaining?  What are you doing?  Also, the people who trapped us so they could watch the credits?  Stop it.  You're not impressing anyone seeing who 3rd Best Boy was on the movie.  I assure you he'd already left the theater before his name rolled.

Book Watch: SuperGods by Grant Morrison

In some ways, I feel like I could send the dozen or so regular readers of this site a copy of SuperGods by Grant Morrison and call it a day with The Signal Watch.

The basic breakdown of the book is equal parts comic book history and Grant Morrison's personal journey and how it associated with comics, eventually becoming his career, which, he reports, is fairly lucrative.  If you read your fair share of comics history and Grant Morrison interviews (and I do), then there's not a whole lot new in the pages, but what Morrison manages to do is what he does so often in the comics he writes: takes an existing idea and takes it on a new journey with a new thesis statement.

The bits of bio about Morrison are what's been reported in comics press: working class Scottish upbringing, hippie anti-nuke parents, punk-era-living under Thatcher, bands, a really vocal attachment to his cats (man, I hear you), early comics he's still talking about, etc...  And if you've read your David Hajdu, Lee Daniels and Gerard Jones, the comics history stuff is mostly known.  However, it's interesting to hear about it through Morrison's filter, what grabbed him as a kid, what grabbed him as a young man, and as a guy at the tipping front end of Generation X (I consider myself the last, dying gasp of the X'ers before Y came along assuming the internet was a foregone conclusion), how we looks at Miller and Moore's books in relation to the industry.  And, of course, he gets to talk a bit about the guys he works with who have been making comics history for the past two decades and more.  

Signal Watch Watches: The Amazing Spider-Man

I think it may have been Tom Spurgeon who commented that, to him, Spider-Man was this thing that occurred between 1962-1972 or so.  And if you've ever read early Spider-Man, it's not hard to see why that might be.  So much of what came afterward has been either retread or adding unnecessary baggage to the Peter Parker formula that seeing the story about the kid who puts on tights to fight crime and super-villains got lost somewhere with alien symbiote suits, clones, clones of clones, clones in symbiote suits, etc...

I've read probably the first 100 issues of Spider-Man in Marvel's phenomenal Essentials collections (and that artwork sings in black and white.  Trust me.).  I can't exactly remember when I first came to Spider-Man, because he was on The Electric Company, starred in TV movies, was in the paper, and was on Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends.  I don't remember either the first Spidey comic I read, nor the last.  I do remember reading the wedding issue when it hit the newstand (it was such a big deal, guys).  But reading Kraven's Last Hunt totally wigged me out and made a bit of a Spider-Fan of me.*

Signal Watch Reads: Edison Rex (from MonkeyBrain Comics)

The first batch of MonkeyBrain Comics is now available for about $6 for 5 comics.  I don't think I've seen that kind of value since I was in high school*, so I want to get that out of the way first and foremost.  Secondly, all of the books are worth at least checking out.  They all hit different beats and will find their specific readerships.  Of the five, three really hit a chord with me, but at that price, I'll still follow all five for a while because, seriously... a dollar.  That's gum money.

I'll probably talk about Aesop's Ark and Bandette later, but I thought that first I should cover the book by MonkeyBrain co-founder, Chris Roberson.

Roberson and artist Dennis Culver paired to bring to life Edison Rex, a sort of Silver Age Superman and Lex Luthor homage that takes a decidedly interesting turn in the first issue, setting up the nemesis of Earth's greatest hero as the protagonist of the book, but not in the way you might expect.

The book is pure gold for both Superman fans and fans of the broad concept of Silver Age superheroics, lantern jawed do-gooders and single-minded mad scientists intent on ruling the world.  It's not that other comics haven't explored some of this territory, be it Waid's Empire** or, now that I think on it, Waid's Incorruptible.  Roberson, however, takes a lighter touch, providing me with my favorite comics quote of the month:

Lord Edison!  Are you certain we should not be conquering, instead?

People, that's just good comics.

The tone is almost Atomic Robo in flavor, and that works well for me in my jaded old age of wanting to have fun reading my funny books, especially those about science villains with plans for world domination.  I've no doubt that by issue 2 or 3, the riff on Superman will be in the past and we'll be moving on to new pastures, but the twist in this makes the homage totally worth it.

The art style feels appropriate in a cartoony, animation-ready style, that totally fits modern sensibilities and is broad enough to handle what I think will be a world with giant robots, laser pistols and the occasional caped superhero.  Well done.

The comics weren't supposed to be out as early as they were released.  But released they are! I suppose with Comixology seeing MonkeyBrain Comics trending practically worldwide on Twitter, the idea of striking while the iron was hot meant that they did not want to make anybody wait any longer.  You can jump online and check out the full line at Comixology!

It's a dollar, for goodness sake.  Give it a shot.

*and given inflation, maybe not since Middle School when I could slip a copy of Batman on the conveyor belt with the family groceries and my mom didn't blink at the cover price.

**Man, now that was a hell of a comic.  Why don't I own that in trade?  That's just crazy.  A beautifully drawn, craftily written volume.

Noir Watch: Desperate (1947)

Woof.

Desperate (1947) feels very much like a movie that was made because somebody needed a thriller and they needed one fast.

One of the things I like best about noir can be the the tightly woven plots that fit together like a Swiss timepiece.  Desperate is not an exemplar of this mode of noir-making.

The world's most illogical criminal gang, led by a pre-Godzilla Raymond Burr, decides that to make their heist run well, they should just hire a truck from a guy Raymond Burr knew when they were kids.  So, they hire the incredibly potent newlywed Steve Randall, played by Steve Brodie.

Steve is onto their scheme after showing up and letting the guys who announce "hey, we found some furs!" load their stuff onto his truck at a warehouse, but gets twitchy when one of them shows his pistol for absolutely no reason.  The gang decides to hold Steve in the truck, but in the cab of the truck where he signals a security officer with the lights.  Bullets fly and mayhem ensues.

Desperate to see the closing credits, maybe.

Signal Watch goes all Teen Angsty with "Rebel Without a Cause"!

Just FYI: I DVR'd this a while back and finally watched it Friday night. It's playing again Saturday on TCM as part of their Natalie Wood-a-thon if you're looking for a night in.

this is the part where I admit I cuffed my jeans in high school because I thought James Dean made it cool.

Rebel Without a Cause (1955) is one of those movies I suspect a lot of people know from the iconography of the poster and can probably tell you it stars James Dean and Natalie Wood, but I don't think most folks around my age have bothered to ever watch.

When I was in middle school a friend's dad who had been of age when the movie came out insisted we get sat down and watch the thing.  At the time I didn't find much of the movie terribly relatable, and I recall we kept having to stop the movie to basically explain the 1950's to us kids in a context that didn't involve Olivia Newton John and John Travolta.

I watched it again in high school, and it felt far more relevant at least in its depiction of the gulf between the world of parents and what's going on with their kids, but that was about 20 years ago.

Rewatching the film highlighted some of the excellent work by director Nicholas Ray, and to see the relationships between the characters through the eyes of an adult (physically, perhaps not emotionally) was most certainly interesting after all this time.  I don't think I really noticed how intensely compressed the timeline of the main action actually is during the film (the last two thirds occurs over basically one day, I believe).  I was far more acutely aware of the cues from Sal Mineo toward James Dean's Jim and that was some pretty bold stuff for a 1955 film.  And, most definitely the relationship between Jim and his parents feels less staged as a plotpoint and more as a condemnation of conflicting parenting styles.  Of course in 2012 a character enjoying having three adults in their household is probably considered excellent parenting above criticism, so, you know...  different times.

Some smaller details stuck out.  I realized that not only do you not really see smokers on the big screen anymore, you never see teenagers smoking, which was a staple of films when I was a kid and goes utterly unmentioned when Natalie Wood and Jimmy Dean light up (to mention it would be uncool, anyway).

Despite being the film he might be most associated with (I guess Giant is the other contender), the movie was released posthumously for Dean.  The fatal car wreck that took his life occurred just a month before the film's premier.  Still, Giant wouldn't hit the screen til after Rebel, and perhaps that's fitting, as the performance and film have greater scope, but it's tragic that Dean would never see the reaction to either.

Dean's performance is of the school that you can recognize from Brando and Newman and other contemporaries who had stepped away from the traditions of the stage actor and played to the intimacy of the camera.  In the mumbling world of the teenaged male, it seemed only too appropriate for the seeming prisoner within his own skin to need a camera snooping closeby when nobody is watching to see what's going on with Jim Stark.

I'm not sure sure that this is the first movie that moved beyond depicting teens as spunky, can-do mini-adults, but the film's impact and potency still resonate in even the goofier teen sex comedies as kids struggle to communicate with their folks and to gain their acceptance/ legitimize whatever the heck it is they're going through (see:  The Breakfast Club).

Because of the age of the characters, it's also a bit easier to understand the decisions made by the protagonists and antagonists in the film, their motives and stakes are worn on their sleeve.

One bit I always liked in the movie, that goes undiscussed, is that the guy who seemed ready to kill Jim early in the film extends a hand of friendship, adding to the tragedy that drives the rest of the movie.  Of course, it says nothing great about Natalie Wood's Judy that she seems to bounce from Buzz to Jim mostly because Buzz is no longer with us, but high school girls...  they're screwy.

Anyway, if you've not seen Dean's defining role and you'd like to see an extremely young Dennis Hopper playing a fellow named "Goon", this is your chance.

Jimmy Stewart Double Bill: "Anatomy of a Murder" and "Harvey"

Not very long ago at all I posted about my reverence for actor Jimmy Stewart.  This week the Paramount Summer Series featured a pair of classic Stewart films, Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Harvey (1950).

You really couldn't hope to find two more different films, and that's what Paramount Summer Series programmer Jesse Trussell was attempting to highlight.  Stewart's affability is most certainly present in both films, but Harvey provides Stewart with a fantasy role in the sort of polite small town atmosphere of mid-century Broadway shows, where old ladies are silly hens and polite misunderstandings are the thing of great screwball comedy.  Meanwhile, Anatomy of a Murder is a fictionalized account of small town murder and the attorney who takes on the case despite some terribly gray areas and open questions (ie: what I believe most defense attorneys are doing when they take on a case).

Signal Watch Watches: Mothra (1961)

Well, of COURSE I watched Mothra (1961).  It came on right after Rodan, so I recorded it to my DVR and watched it later.

Uh...

So, I don't know how many Toho Studios Kaiju movies you've watched.  I've seen about 10-15% of their output, and I've always liked "the twins", the two mysterious faeries that popped up and sang and seemed to be friends with all the giant monsters on Monster Island.  I had never seen the original Mothra movie, but had seen the giant flying bug in other Godzilla films, and not found her without her charms.  But after the super rampage that was Rodan, something about this film seemed a bit too tame, and sort of pre-sages the era of movies wherein we'll lose focus from steely-jawed scientists, wise-cracking journalists and other adults in the lead and devolve into an endless sea of kids in bad shorts named "Kenny" as the protagonist of the film.

A Chronologically Amiss Discussion of Mark Waid's "Irredeemable" and "Incorruptible"

Hey, have I mentioned my enthusiasm for Mark Waid's Irredeemable and Incorruptible?  I have?  Ad nauseum?

Oh, well.

Both series have drawn to a close in the monthly installment format, but that's not how I've read either comic.  Sure, I started with monthlies on Irredeemable, but Boom! met me where I lived and began releasing trades immediately after the conclusion of arcs, something DC and Marvel grew keen to about the same time, but it seemed part of the Boom! DNA from the start of the series.

However, as the series have each drawn to a close, I am still behind.  I finally was able to catch up on the narratively driven Irredeemable/ Incorruptible cross-over I saw appearing on the stands for a couple of months, and which I've finally been able to enjoy for myself.

And I do mean "enjoy".  The series manage to do something which seems to obvious from even a quick glance, and that's allow Waid's voice to be the only voice guiding the single world shared by both books, and plot out the two books as counter-measures to one another, with one book following a Superman-like hero gone not so much comic book evil as omnicidal, and a stone cold, amoral villain gone so straight he's now the alien walking the earth.

It says much that the world seems more confused by the transformation of villain Max Damage to hero than the impotent inevitability of humanity's destruction at the hands of a hero who turned.

Waid could have told the story of just the Plutonian and that would have been more than enough, but the addition of the story of Max Damage, unbending hero from just a god-awful, horrendous villain (a guy bad enough that his sidekick was an underage girl he flaunted by naming her "Jailbait".  I mean, yikes), gives both stories resonance, not just about the lead characters - which it does - but about how we really feel about someone trying to do good, and our expectations of those people.  And, frankly, how alien a concept it is to see someone perform acts of selflessness.

Even the power set granted Max Damage (super strength and invulnerability that becomes stronger the longer he stays awake) has a heroic bent to it that just seemed like a minor liability as a criminal.  Max has to intentionally remain sleep-deprived for days to operate on a serious scale, staggering around with the power of a god at his fingertips, but almost out of his mind, just looking for a place to lay down, and all the craziness any of us get when we haven't gotten our forty winks.  Brilliant stuff.

There's one more collection left for each series.  I'll miss it, but I'm glad Waid has had an opportunity to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end that commented and meta-commented, and in the tradition of novelistic storytelling, it's fine if we don't get a second installment or more of the same.  I wouldn't say no to more (from Waid), but if we don't return to these characters... thanks for the series.

Signal Watch Reads: The Jugger by Richard Stark

I've never been a book series guy before, but I guess between the John Carter books and now finishing my sixth Parker novel, I'm a book series guy.

I'm totally in the bag for the Parker books by Richard Stark (aka:  Donald Westlake).


The Jugger (1965) picks up finding Parker in small town Nebraska to check on his contact and the closest thing to a friend he's got (not that he's sentimental about it), Joe Sheer.  Only to to find that the panicky letters he'd been getting from Sherer were on the money, and by the time he's arrived, Sheer has died rather suddenly.

But since his arrival, local law has been keeping an eye on Parker, and now a twerp from the criminal underground has shown up insisting Parker must be there for some reason other than to say adios to Joe Sheer.  And he's just smalltime and dumb enough to think he can play ball with Parker.

Mad Men Season 5 Ends

Season 5 of Mad Men ended Sunday night.  That means only two more seasons to go, which is good.  TV shows need to know where they're headed or you run into the X-Files Syndrome.

People talk about smart TV, and then they mention something like Lost that was sort of dumb TV in smart-TV drag.  The creators got so caught up in creating loop-de-loops of logic and plotting, they managed to do a lot of hand waving about some sort of spiritual meaning to the proceedings, but by the mid-point of the final season, it was pretty clear that what they meant by spiritual was a non-threatening atmosphere CD from Target.

Mad Men, somehow, is a show you can most certainly watch as a soap opera with people falling in and out of love, having illicit sex, making bad decisions, etc...  But it's increasingly a show that's built on its longevity to build a lexicon and a readability that until 15 years ago, was reserved for film and books.

Signal Watch Watches: Prometheus (2012)

Look, this thing is full of spoilers, so don't bother unless you've seen the movie.

Signal Watch Watches: Stardust Memories (1980)

Interesting.

So, as some found horrifying, I didn't take to Allen's 1979 film Manhattan.  I've generally basically liked the Woody Allen movies I'd seen, so I gave Allen's follow-up, Stardust Memories (1980), a whirl and hopefully my positive reaction will get me back in your good graces as a watcher of cinemaaaah.

Basically, Stardust Memories solves the problems I had with Manhattan in many ways, or The Problem I had with Manhattan, which was that I finished the movie thinking "and so what?".  It seemed as if in Manhattan Allen had found he had a particular patter down from Annie Hall, found he could play himself in his own context, and it didn't really matter if the story went anywhere or was basically upperclass urbanites mistaking their high school-ish romantic tangles as interesting enough for the rest of us (yes, I got the thing that Allen's character could only connect with a high schooler.  All well and good til you consider his real life marital woes, which...), and the clumsy, flailing quest for something "deep" by self-medicating and spending too much on therapy that went nowhere as a pursuit unto itself.

Stardust Memories acknowledges all the questions, perhaps a bit too on the nose from time to time, but it at least tries to move beyond Allen in one of his stand-in roles, but challenges the character, adding on the layer of the frustrated artist at a crosspoint in his life of the guy who has made it, and all the expectation and responsibility inherent.  The trials of the filmmaker, piled on top of the usual hand wringing Allenisms over the allure and complications of women drive the character conflict, and create enough of an arc to give the movie the weight that Manhattan sought for but never achieved.

I guess if you're going to have a "character driven story", this is a pretty darn good example of what that can look like, even if its hard not to guess how close the "character" is, as pre-usual, just Allen casting himself against good looking women.

Watching the movie, I still grapple a bit with some of the line delivery and Allen-patter, and 70's-era signposts for intellectualism that had become a parody of themselves by the time I came of age, but I won't hold it against the film, especially as it pushes the narrative boundaries a bit, and effectively at that.  Further, while Manhattan is always the movie that gets the credit for the visual love letter to New York, I'll take the work in this movie.  Even without the dialog and banter, it seems to use the frame less to show and more to tell the story.

Anyway, fear not Woody Allen fans.  I have not sworn off the man's work.

Signal Watch Watches: Best Worst Movie (2009)

After a steady diet of terrible flicks over the past two decades, something I had somehow come to enjoy in my teen years, seeking out bad movies is something I'm now limiting in my intake as I realized a man can only watch R.O.T.O.R. so many times, and there's actually stuff you can enjoy because its actually worth watching.  But for a long, long time I felt like I was fairly well in tune with what we all considered the worst of the worst.

And yet, somehow, I'd missed the phenomenon of Troll 2.

Of course, I was also living in Phoenix when The Alamo figured out how to turn genre-film and midnight screening material into part of their bread and butter, getting people excited about movies that they had never seen, or getting them to pay good money to see movies they'd seen for a far more modest cost on late-night HBO a decade before.

The first time I ever heard the words "Troll 2" was, curiously, at an improv show performance where one of the actresses mistakenly believed that repeatedly making callbacks to a movie few people have not seen nor remember was comedic gold.  I swear she dropped the movie's name four times, hoping for a laugh.  She was greeted with stony silence, but the fact that she kept going back to the well made me realize "oh, this is one of those things today's hipster kids are into.  I get it.  But, seriously, naming something funny when you aren't doesn't draw a laugh.  STOP IT NOW.".

Best Worst Movie (2009) tracks the circa 2006 fad (I'll go ahead and call it that) of being really into Troll 2 from the perspective of the folks who participated in the creation of the movie, including the stars, writer, director, extras and, of course, some of the folks making midnight screenings happen.

The film's former wanna-be child star, Michael Stephenson, actually does an amazing job directing the documentary, collecting all the folks from the film together, getting them to talk honestly both about the film, where they are now, and how they related to the film then and now.  A lot of the questions I had left over at the end of Rock-afire Explosion are nowhere to be found in this film.  I mean, sure, you can still have some questions, but those might be of a nature that you can sort out for yourself.  Basically, the film doesn't raise more questions than it answers, and its pretty honest about what's going on.

Signal Watch Double Bill: Shock Corridor (1963) & The Naked Kiss (1964)

Holy hell, y'all.

I'm not familiar with the work of writer/ director/ producer Samuel Fuller, but he has one of those names you always hear.  And, I haven't had opportunity yet to visit the Paramount yet this summer for the summer series, nor had I ever been in the State Theater on Congress, side by side with the Paramount.  Wednesday night provided a great opportunity to knock some items off my list, and so I caught both Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964), two movies that earned their bonafides.

Of the two films, Shock Corridor may have dated more poorly, even if it still holds up very well from a narrative standpoint.  It follows a newspaper journalist who knows he can earn a Pulitzer by going undercover into an mental hospital to solve a murder the police have been unable to crack as the only three witnesses were hopelessly mentally ill.  He recruits his stripper girlfriend, played by the lovely Constance Towers, into posing as his sister who files charges of attempted sexual assault.  With training from a psychologist, Johnny Barrett sneaks in undetected.

And then learns that a mental hospital run under the common practices of mid-20th Century medicine was no picnic.

When they make my bio-pic, tell them this is exactly what I want the poster to look like, but with Jamie dancing in the corner.