I’ve been largely neglecting this site lately because of my other blogging duties, though over the next few days there will be links and maybe some bonus materials for a couple of Bullz-Eye.com reviews, but I did want to revive a tradition and post a favorite video of mine, the great RKO short film “The House I Live In.” Written by Albert Maltz and directed by Mervyn LeRoy, it’s a wartime propaganda piece for tolerance (except where it comes to our nation’s WWII enemies, of course), and tolerance can always use some good propaganda. Anyhow, I’m never able to get through this one without misting up, and it really does some up what I think all Americans have to be thankful for today and all days, especially this year.

As always, a quick proviso for those who’ve never seen this. The first song Frank Sinatra sings here isn’t much and was clearly the promotional part of the film. If you’re the slightest bit bored/impatient, skip ahead to 2:43 when Frank goes out for a smoke.

THE HOUSE I LIVE IN

Bryan | MySpace Video

I was very sorry to hear earlier this morning of the death at age 79 of a personal favorite of mine, Edward Woodward. Although he may still be best known for his roles in the acclaimed fact-based war drama, “Breaker Morant,” the espionage/crime-vigilante TV series, “The Equalizer,” and by our friends in England as the cynical, super-tough spy “Callan,” his role in what was once a fairly obscure cult film all but buried by its studio, the 1973 “The Wicker Man,” is getting the lion’s share of attention in most of his press obituaries, that’s including the very touching one issued by the BBC this morning.

“The Wicker Man” has been one of my favorite movies since I was teenager and remains so now — not even the worst imaginable remake can touch that film, and that proposition has now been tested. Still, my admiration of the actor Woodward goes well beyond one single role. He was the kind of performer you could rely on to be great in anything and so he was on countless television programs. A master of understatement who knew when and how to go big (the oft-spoiled ending of “The Wicker Man” being a case in point), he was a real virtuoso whose un-showy approach probably doomed him to being underrated to a certain degree. Still, he didn’t seem to mind and judging from the press accounts I’ve been reading, he was a real gentleman and as fun to be around as his best known characters were definitely not. He was also, by the way, an accomplished Shakespearian stage actor and a fair-to-middling pop singer. It’s a shame he rarely got to do either on screen, though his voice can be heard to powerful effect during the final scene of “Breaker Morant.” (If you don’t mind learning the fate of his title character, or already know it from history, you can see the conclusion here.)

Two of his more devoted fans appear to have been Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, who were smart enough to cast Woodward in “Hot Fuzz,” and you can read their thoughts at Wright’s blog and via a message board post by Pegg. (Big h/t to Beaks.) Wright’s piece is really lovely and I strongly recommend you read all of if . However, here’s one line that tickled me, in the spirit of “it’s funny because it’s true.”

I also remember telling him that Quentin [Tarantino] was a huge fan of his film ‘Sitting Target’ (another great soundtrack – btw) and he looked shocked. I’m not sure anyone had ever complimented him on it. He replied “Well, you must tell your friend he is very strange indeed”.

And so it goes, another great lost. I do want to echo Edgar Wright’s entreaty that, especially you’ve never seen it, you watch the 1973 “The Wicker Man” as fast as possible and avoid any place where spoilers about the ending might be found, which seems to be about 99% of what’s been posted about it recently. (I tried to avoid giving too much away in my 2000 review linked to above.) Woodward’s portrayal of a repressed, bitter, humorless, but also decent, principled, and compassionate man is, to me, very much what acting is all about. So, why are we surprised to hear about what a funny and regular guy he was in real life? He was acting — extraordinarily well.

Greg of Cinema Styles has more. Highly recommended.

Originally posted at Premium Hollywood.

I’m 17 years late getting on board the “Army of Darkness” cult train, but I’m pretty glad I finally did, even if I’m not certain I’ll be taking many repeat trips. A sequel to Sam Raimi’s late 80s horror comedy non-sequel, “Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn,” “Army” drops most of the horror of the prior film and combines Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” with bargain basement Tolkien and a huge dose of imaginative slapstick comedy in the vein of classic era Warner Brothers cartoons and the Three Stooges. The result is a pretty rich broth of high-style geekery.

The film opens as wisecracking, chainsaw-armed, loutish, egotistical big-box hardware store clerk hero, Ash (cult superstar Bruce Campbell) and his Oldsmobile Delta Royale fall through some kind of time hole and wind up in 13th century England by way of California’s Bronson Canyon and Vasquez Rocks. Held captive by Lord Arthur (Marcus Gilbert), his only initial supporter is the local Wiseman (Ian Abercrombie). However, victory in battle against some hideous monsters and the chance to use his magical “boomstick” (actually, a non-magical 12-gauge shotgun) adds to Ash’s credibility and helps to attract the amorous attention of a refined and beautiful noblewoman (Embeth Davidtz, adding a touch of class and some real emotion to the proceedings).

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The hype around “Paranormal Activity” is more than justified, but it still isn’t much more than an extremely well-made engine for getting a roomful of people to squirm, giggle, and actually scream in near unison. In a way, it’s entirely unfair that I’ve given this barebones video terror flick a slightly higher rating than an artful and far more fully developed horror construction like “Drag Me to Hell, but life isn’t fair and dramatic depictions of creeping death are even less so.

“Paranormal Activity,” which has been making the film festival rounds since last year, starts out in true post-”Blair Witch” fashion, eschewing ordinary credits and replacing them with titles implying that Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat may be less than completely healthy; the filmmakers thank their parents and their local police department for the use of the edited home video footage we’re about to see. After that, the set-up is about as simple as things get: Grad-student Katie believes that she has been dogged by a decidedly unfriendly presence of some sort her entire life, and that lately it has been getting worse. As our tale begins, her ebulliently arrogant day trader live-in boyfriend, Micah, decides to pursue the spectral whatsis by putting them both under constant videotape surveillance in their very large San Diego townhouse. (Since the movie is set in 2006, we can assume the careless Micah purchased the house via a highly suspect interest-only loan. Perhaps it’s just as well.)

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****

“Your reality is already half video hallucination. If you’re not careful, it will become total hallucination. You’ll have to learn to live in a very strange new world.” – Media philosopher Brian O’Blivion in David Cronenberg’s “Videodrome” (1983)

So far, the bulk of gifted documentarian Ondi Timoner’s work has dealt with the forces that persuade human beings to give up some par of themselves, whether it be in pursuit of creative growth, God, or fame. Her latest film, takes that as far as it can possibly go. Unlike her remarkable “DiG!,” about the cultish neo-psychedelic rock band, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, or “Join Us,” about an actual religious cult, this time the cult is not just a few fanatics, it’s you and me.

I first praised the Sundance Grand Jury prize-winning “We Live in Public,” opening Friday at L.A.’s Nuart Theater (with special Q&As Friday and Saturday nights), back in June when I saw it at the Los Angeles Film Festival. The screening was capped off with the then somewhat surprising appearance by the documentary’s antihero, Internet entrepreneur and self-styled conceptual artist Josh Harris. Having returned from an idyll in Ethiopia, he said that his next project was something he called “the Wired City” and that, in his view, a typical human’s life in the future is going to be something like the present day existence of “a Purdue chicken.” He also said he hadn’t seen the movie and wasn’t sure when he would.

READ THE REST AT PREMIUM HOLLYWOOD

David Mamet’s third film starts out exactly like the Mamet cop movie you think you want to see – a detailed, literate, and darkly funny police procedural. But what begins like a sort of dry run for the classic ‘90s TV series, “Homicide: Life on the Street,” right down to its Baltimore locations, becomes a somber examination of the meaning of being Jewish in modern America and, more broadly, the dangers of excessive identity politics. Indeed, the warning the film delivers about the dangerous side of ethnic identity is so stark that it’s easy to wonder whether the Mamet of today – a stridently outspoken observant Jew and a self-outed conservative – wouldn’t have written a different story entirely.

“Homicide” stars the man I still consider the ultimate Mamet actor, Joe Mantegna, as Bobby Gold, a homicide detective who specializes in negotiating with suspects. We later learn, however, that the specialty might not have been entirely by choice because Officer Gold has something to prove. Being Jewish, he’s had to deal with an assumption that he is a soft and unphysical nebbish, so proving his toughness by being “first in the door” is a must and being assumed to have the gift of gab is almost a plus. (Almost everyone in a Mamet production has that gift, in any case.) Moreover, perhaps because he’s had to deal with a fair amount of abuse his whole life because of his identity, he seems to have internalized the bigotry and become a real-life version of a frequent mythological figure in intra-Jewish political battles – the “self-hating Jew.”

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****

A bit of prime Mamet which means, of course, verbally entirely NSFW.

Now, time for a cooling walk.

And also the Beatles reissue and, what the heck, Rosh Hoshannah (Jewish New Year), too.

Growing up in L.A., sometimes you share a more personal connection with notable actors that you almost forget and then, at odd times, you remember them. For example, I just remembered that Henry Gibson used the same West L.A. veteranarian as my family did growing up. Also, the “dead” child from his great “Fund for the Dead” bit from Kentucky Fried Movie was an acquaintance of mine at Venice High.

Anyhow, I really am sorry that he passed on relatively young at age 73 — and in a week with so many passings he might not get his full due. Nevertheless, I’ve got a more detailed remembrance of the great Mr. Gibson up over at Premium Hollywood, including the few online clips I could find.

An important chunk of entertainment history left us yesterday with the death of Larry Gelbart at 81. Gelbart was gifted both working alone and as a collaborator with other writers. It probably helped that relatively early in his career he labored alongside Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Neil Simon on comedian Sid Caesar’s classic early variety shows. In the sixties he graduated to Broadway and the movies. With Burt Shevelove, he cowrote the book for the Broadway musical/Zero Mostel vehicle, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (later filmed by Richard Lester) and the hard to find all-star cult British comedy, “The Wrong Box.” A Chicago-born graduate of L.A.’s Fairfax High (right across the street from Cantor’s Deli), he lived in England for a time, working with another nice Jewish boy named Marty Feldman at the height of his English television fame.

He became much better known in the seventies as the primary writer during the early, funnier and more politically pointed days on the television version of “M*A*S*H.” I get to write about him because he made a mark in movies that’s too important to ignore, writing several good ones, and some not so good. He’ll probably be most commonly remembered for his work on “Oh, God” with George Burns in the title role, and what is probably Dustin Hoffman’s best performance in “Tootsie,” which is something of a comedy classic. He also co-wrote with Sheldon Keller the vastly underrated and all but impossible to see spoof of early Hollywood (specifically Warner Brothers) films, “Movie, Movie,” directed by Stanley Donen and starring George C. Scott, Eli Wallach, Trish van Devere, and Barry Bostwick. (A likely model for “Grindhouse,” in that it was also a double-feature complete with fake trailers.) It more than made up for the regrettable but profitable “Blame it On Rio,” written by Gelbart and also directed by Donen, which starred Michael Caine, Joseph Bologna and an extremely young Demi Moore.

In the nineties, he divided his time between Broadway plays like “City of Angels,” a musical spoof of classic hard-boiled detective novels, and pointed TV movies like “Barbarians at the Gate” — a tongue in cheek version of a nonfiction book about the buyout of Nabisco — and 1992’s “Mastergate,” an unbelievably witty parody of the hearings that invariably follow major Washington scandals.

Mr. Gelbart never stopped writing until almost the end, and was easily one of the most respected and beloved writers in all of show business. 81 isn’t exactly young, but we could’ve used a few more years of his presence. It’s a sad weekend for the world of funny.

Below, a great moment from “Tootsie.”

[This posted appeared originally at “Premium Hollywood.”]

He might have seemed as much of a permanent Hollywood fixture as the Chinese Theater or Musso & Frank, but columnist Army Archerd, for decades the writer of the “Just for Variety” column, past away yesterday from cancer at the age of 87. Growing up in Los Angeles with a permanent eye fixed on the movies, I was nevertheless rarely a regular Variety reader except when I was lucky enough to be working someplace with a subscription, but Archerd’s importance was obvious.

He was a fairly far cry from the muckraking and abrasive Nikki Finke and a much further cry from the punishing, often vindictive, gossip/entertainment columnists of the past like the mean-spirited but powerful Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper. Indeed, I had kind of forgotten that the younger Archerd had fought the Hollywood blacklist. Winchell and Hopper had done very much the opposite.

When Archerd broke a personal story about a celebrity it wasn’t to try and “destroy” them and, in the most famous instance, it was a social good — though not everyone thought so at the time. For those who can’t remember the news that aging onetime superstar Rock Hudson had AIDS, it’s hard to explain the importance of the event. It was the first time many had even heard of the disease, which was already devastating the lives of untold numbers of people. Even in L.A., where Hudson’s sexual preference was an open secret even outside the show business world, the news raised the awareness of the quickly spreading disease far beyond the confines of the gay community, where it was already a devastating fact of life. Outside of Hollywood, it was also maybe the moment where “middle America” became aware that some of their favorite performers were not heterosexual.

For me, however, however, Archerd was always the pleasant, calm guy I grew up watching at the Oscars or at the Hollywood Christmas Parade. I was never a regular reader of his column, but he was just always there. I don’t know what to say except that I half expect those cement footprints in front of the theater Sid Grauman built might go away, too. Nikki Finke and, of course, Variety have excellent obituaries up.

Also, see Finke’s comments. Starting off with one by actor/activist Mike Farrell (”MASH”), it’s a pretty moving tribute.

(Originally posted at Premium Hollywood.)