The Sweet Smell of Success is one of the great screenplays, and films, of all time. It’s an absolutely vicious piece of work about a powerful New York gossip columnist (Burt Lancaster) and a sleazy impresario who spends the film trying to scrape his way into his good graces (Tony Curtis, in a rare villainous turn). The level of 50s slime out-does anything in “Mad Men” and the dialogue cuts with every nasty, New-York-Overdrive quip. Plot summary follows:

A classic of the late 1950s, this film looks at the string-pulling behind-the-scenes action between desperate press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) and the ultimate power broker in that long-ago show-biz Manhattan: gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). Written by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets (who based the Hunsecker character on the similarly brutal and power-mad Walter Winchell), the film follows Falco’s attempts to promote a client through Hunsecker’s column—until he is forced to make a deal with the devil and help Hunsecker ruin a jazz musician who has the nerve to date Hunsecker’s sister. Director Alexander MacKendrick and cinematographer James Wong Howe, shooting on location mostly at night, capture this New York demimonde in silky black and white, in which neon and shadows share a scarily symbiotic relationship—a near-match for the poisonous give-and-take between the edgy Curtis and the dismissive Lancaster.

The screenplay by Odets and Lehman is one of the most incredible pieces of writing I’ve ever read/viewed, surpassing, perhaps, even classics of nasty dialogue (and I’ll go out on a limb here) like The Lion in Winter and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? There’s just no comparison to any other film and I think this is the ultimate flick for ANYBODY who works in the media. Check out the trailer below to see what I mean.

(Amazon: The Sweet Smell of Success)

 
Mister Freedom is a 1969 satire directed by expat American fashion photographer William Klein. It stars French actress Delphne Seyrig (who was also in Day of the Jackal). Donald Pleasence and Serge Gainsbourg have supporting roles and May 1968 student rebel-rouser Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand have uncredited cameos.
 

 
Mister Freedom concerns a loutish, jingoistic American superhero, a self-righteous idiot run amok, who’s willing to destroy France in order to save it from the Ruskies and Chinamen. Obviously this is a parody of American foreign policy of the Vietnam era, but what’s so utterly uncanny about the film is how well it predicts the Bush era. It’s incredible! Watch a clip and see if you agree:
 

 
Beck made a “tribute” to Mister Freedom with his Sexx Laws video and the Japanese pop duo Pizzicato 5 made an homage to the film with their Sister Freedom Tapes EP.
 

 
Fans of Chris Smith (American Movie, The Yes Men) can look forward to the indie director’s upcoming release, Collapse.  In it, Smith gives the Errol Morris treatment to Michael Ruppert, the one-time cop turned investigative journalist.

Here’s what Apple’s Trailer site has to say about Collapse which, curiously, is listed as both a documentary and a horror film (but then again, if you know about Ruppert, maybe it’s not so curious at all):

Americans generally like to hear good news. They like to believe that a new President will right old wrongs, that clean energy will replace dirty oil, and that fresh thinking will set the economy straight.  American pundits tend to restrain their pessimism and to hope for the best.  But is anyone prepared for the worst?  Michael Ruppert is a different kind of American.  He predicted the current financial crisis in his self-published newsletter ?

 
Fascinating story in this month’s W about the late filmmaker Ingmar Bergman‘s private retreat on the Swedish island of

 
Next month, as part of MOMA‘s “To Save And Project” festival devoted to newly restored films, American artist Kara Walker will introduce a new print of Lotte Reiniger‘s magnificent 1926 film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the oldest surviving animated feature film on record.

If you’ve never seen Walker’s work up close—and you should—it bears a striking resemblance to that of the German animator.  Born in Berlin in 1899, Reiniger developed an early fascination with silhouette puppetry and the films of

“Brokeback Island” by Dave MacDowell
 

“Fat Kenickie” by Danielle Rizzolo
 
Here’s an amusing look at a Kevin Smith-themed art show held at Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight in Los Angeles. More paintings here.
 
(via Nerdcore)

 
Hundreds of thousands have thrilled to the Indian Superman, but fewer have seen the Filipino Batman…

Batman en Robin is a Bat-spoof made in the Philippines in 1993. It stars comedian Joey de Leon and his son Keempee de Leon. The Penguin-character is called Chu-p-a-enguin, which literally means “Blowjob-guin” in Spanglish. There are musical numbers—why not?—and Wonder Woman makes an appearance. A midget Spiderman, too. And check out the Joker!

In the final scene, the cast does a nutty cover version of At The Hop with lyrics like “Let’s be good of blood, Let’s be good of heart, Let’s be afraid of God, Let’s believe in LOVE!”
 

 
The LA Times recently noted the 30th birthday of Phantasm, the first entry in director Don Coscarelli‘s quartet of Phantasm horror films.  Scraped together from a meager budget, and shot and edited over a period of roughly 20 months, Phantasm and its sequels continue to suck me in with a frequency that I’m sure wreaks havoc with whatever Netflix algorithm crunches out the recommendations linking those films to L’Eclisse.

For Phantasm newbies here’s the story (the bare bones, so to speak), per its official film site:

Michael Baldwin and Bill Thornbury star as two brothers who discover that their local mortuary hides a legion of hooded killer dwarf-creatures, a flying silver sphere of death, and is home to the sinister mortician known only as the Tall Man.  This nefarious undertaker (with an iconic performance by Angus Scrimm) enslaves the souls of the damned and in the process his character has entered the pantheon of classic horror villains.

Sounds kicky, right?  What the synopsis leaves out, though—and what no synopsis could possibly accommodate—is precisely that elusive, unquantifiable element that makes the Phantasm films, in my eyes, so haunting.  Whether due to exigencies of budget or imagination, the logic these films operate under is so far out and unpredictable, the effect is like watching a 6-hour nightmare unspool before your eyeballs. 

How is one supposed to reconcile, exactly, hooded dwarves, funeral homes, and flying, eyeball-gouging orbs?  Um, I’m not sure you can, really (believe me, I’ve tried!).  And as the quartet progresses, the entire Phantasm mythology assumes ever-more grand and baroque dimensions.  For example…

SPOILER ALERT: About those dwarves?  Oh, they’re ultimately destined for another planet.  Those flying silver balls?  They’re storage containers for the souls of the recently departed.  END SPOILERS.

Contrast that inability to reconcile so many dreamy, disparate elements with the boringly formulaic, teenage-slashing rhythms of Freddy and Jason, and you can begin to understand how I consider Don Coscarelli more in league with Suspiria-meister Dario Argento, than the Wes Craven of Scream and Elm Street.

And, much like Argento, whose capacity for creative bloodletting seems undiminshed by time, Coscarelli continues to direct.  His last film, the cult-fave Bubba Ho-Tep, starred the always great Ossie Davis and Bruce Campbell.  The trailer for the original Phantasm follows below:

 
In the LA Times: Happy Birthday, Tall Man! “Phantasm” Turns 30

Official Phantasm Site

This (tall?) tale about why Harvey Keitel was allegedly booted from Eyes Wide Shut scorches the brain. See below:

Keitel and Kidman just did a scene in which Keitel’s character is supposed to stand behind Kidman’s character and masturbate.

Keitel is not only a fine actor, he is a method actor.

You probably see what is coming ?

Via Defamer, Bourne Identity director Doug Liman spills the tricks of the trade:

In the elite all-guy fraternity of big time directors it’s a rare thing for one of their own to speak out against the excesses of the brotherhood. But notoriously difficult auteur Doug Liman seems to have forgotten his loyalties.

In an entry in a blog devoted to chronicling the development of his new film that apparently involves the moon, the Bourne Identity helmer let slip that that old “process” thing that has been used by generations of Hollywood enablers to excuse all sorts of psychotic behavior might just be, you know, creativity aside, a bunch of excuses used by megalomaniac directors and actors excuses to get away with shoving their hands down the crew’s pants.

You don’t say? Liman goes on to reveal:

A hilarious thing about the movie business is that you can get away with anything as long as you call it “process.” Literally, anything. I mean, he’s sound asleep! The director is literally sound asleep on set - what the hell’s going on here? Well, he’s slept through his last three movies, and they were huge hits. It’s how he works; that’s his “process.” He’ll wake up at some point and give notes, but for now, let him catch a few Zs. I haven’t been in the business that long, but at this point I can’t think of a single outrageous behavior that I haven’t seen occur on set and then heard excused as someone’s process.

I have a friend who was directing his first feature film, and the actor who’s starring in it came up to the director, my friend, and said: “Just to let you know from the beginning, I’m going to be stoned in my trailer every morning and all day long. But before anyone panics, I’ve been stoned in every movie I’ve been in, and I was stoned when I auditioned for you. You’ve basically never seen me when I’m not stoned. The guy that you’ve cast is basically stoned, so don’t be alarmed that I’m in my trailer getting stoned.”

Then there’s the director who was known for fondling P.A.‘s in the video village. Explicitly fondling them - putting his hands down the pants of P.A.s in the video village in front of everybody. And what did the studio do? They built a tent so no one could see. They created a private little video village for him so they wouldn’t get sued for sexual harassment by the rest of the crew.

Oh, Hollywood. No wonder the rest of the world can’t stand you!

(Defamer: Doug Liman)