A Night At Gatsby's

I’ve been a big Marx Brothers fan since I was in my early teens; I used to watch all their movies on New York TV, and I thought (still think) the best ones, like Duck Soup, are just about the funniest movies ever.You might well have noticed a lot of Marx Brotherish stuff in Samurai Cat, for example. Anyway, I was  very sorry that they didn’t make more films, and was rather surprised to learn that they really weren’t that popular during the thirties...their movies got great reviews, and everybody agreed they were sensational, but audiences just didn’t flock to their stuff—I believe that the Ritz Brothers, who nobody watches today, were much better box office. The aforementioned Duck Soup was the fifth Marx Brothers film for Paramount, and it didn’t do well...their contract ran out, and the studio dumped them. They got picked up by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, who insisted on a rather different approach, involving more plot, romantic stuff, and big musical numbers (in addition to harp and piano solos by Harpo and Chico). The first two MGM movies, Night at the Opera and Day At the Races, set the mold, and they were still pretty good, but things declined after that.

Now, what I didn’t know is that Opera actually got its start as their last Paramount project, namely, an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Originally it was going to be called Scrambled Eggs, after East and West Egg in Long Island, where the novel is set; but then the title was changed to A Night at Gatsby’s. The script was by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and S.J. Perelman, although by the time it hit the theatres, it would undoubtedly have been pretty well transformed by adlibs, as always happened with Marx Brothers movies. Certainly, the source material got a pretty drastic working over...Dr. T.J. Eckleburg was substituted for the Nick Carraway character, because Groucho felt that TJ Eckleburg was a great Groucho name. Chico was given Meyer Wolfsheim’s part, because it was felt that Italians and Jews were a similar species, as evidenced by the fact that Chico always played an Italian. Wolfsheim served as Gatsby’s interpreter, Gatsby being played by Harpo, who communicated entirely in horn honks...by this time, Zeppo was out of the picture.

The story had Eckleburg moving in next to Gatsby and observing some wild parties. Receiving an invitation to one of these shindigs, Eckleburg runs into Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby’s business partner. A filmed version of this scene, and several others, actually survives...the Brothers were in the habit of testing material on audiences to see what worked and what didn’t, and it’s possible to hunt this stuff down on the web. Filled with adlibs, these little slices of comedic gold diverge a damn sight from the script:



Wolfsheim: Heckleburg, Heckleburg...

Eckleburg: Yes, Dr. TJ Eckleburg.

Wolfsheim: Where do I knowa that name from...

Eckleburg: There’s a billboard...

Wolfsheim: Yeah right. With you eyes all big...looking out in the ash...Hey, you make an ash of yourself!

Eckleburg: I get that all the time.

Wolfsheim: Well, it’s a good one, hey boss?

Eckleburg: You don’t seem very much like a Wolfsheim.

Wolfsheim: I don’t think so too, but you gotta be what you are.

Eckleburg; Well, speaking of that, who is this Gatsby fellow anyway? I live right next to him, but---

Wolfsheim: We make alotta dough together, but there’s some things I don’t know.

Eckleburg: Like what?

Wolfsheim: I can’t say.

Eckleburg: He spends all day looking at a dock.

Wolfsheim: Why a dock? He wanna make soup?

Eckleburg: No, not a duck. A dock.

Wolfsheim: He look at you?

Eckleburg: Why would he?

Wolfsheim: You’re a Doc. Doc Heckleburg.

Eckleburg; No, no, not doc, dock. D-O-C-K. You know, where the boats come up.

Wolfsheim: Come up? Lika the U-boat?

Eckleburg: No, not like that. A regular boat.

Wolfsheim: But itsa  you boat, right? I’d like to take a ride in you boat.

Eckleburg: I don’t have a boat.

Wolfsheim: Atsa shame.




In another test, we have all three brothers plus Paramount starlet Grace Bradley as Daisy, and Margaret Dumont, who plays Daisy’s mother, Mrs. Madeleine Effingwell. Gatsby has learned that Eckleburg is Daisy’s optometrist, and has asked him to invite her over to his house, so he can rekindle their old romance. But  he doesn’t reckon on Mrs.Effingwell tagging along as a chaperone. The scene begins with Gatsby and Wolfsheim showing up at Eckleburg’s:



Gatsby: Honk.

Eckleburg: What did he say?

Wolfsheim: He say he very nervous, wonder if this was good idea.

Eckleburg: All that with one honk?

Wolfsheim: Great, huh?

Eckleburg: How did you learn to understand him?

Gatsby: Honk.

Wolfsheim: He don’t want you to know.

Eckleburg: Why not?

Wolfsheim: He’s a mystery man.

We hear car doors thumping. There’s a knock at the door, and Eckleburg jumps to answer it. In come Mrs. Madeline Effingwell, and her daughter, Daisy. Gatsby begins to honk furiously.

Wolfsheim: He say itsa no good, he no wanna the mother, just be alone with his girl.

Mrs. Effingwell: I have come to make absolutely certain that nothing untoward occurs...

Gatsby honks and goes to stand in the corner.

Mrs. Effingwell to Eckleburg: What is the meaning of this?

Eckleburg: It’s sort of like that, but---

Mrs. Effingwell:You misunderstand me...

Eckleburg: No, I misunderstand you.

Mrs. Effingwell: What are you doing, arranging assignations between that man...(She points at Gatsby, who honks) and my Daisy?

Eckleburg: Do I look like someone who would assignate? You cut me to the quick.

Mrs. Effingwell: I thought you were an optometrist....

Wolfsheim: No, he don’t think things ever work out...

Eckleburg (vehemently): I refuse to be characterized as a pessimist.

Wolfsheim (pouncing): Too late.

Mrs. Effingwell: My daughter is a married woman!

Gatsby: Honk.

Wolfsheim: He say, it’s okay, he no mind.

Mrs. Effingwell: Who is this, this foreigner?

Wolfsheim: I’m the guy who fixed the 1919 World Series.

Mrs. Effingwell, in high dudgeon: A mobster?

Wolfsheim: I no think so...I no hava the big red claws.

Mrs. Effingwell: A racketeer then?

Wolfsheim: I no play tennis.

Mrs. Effingwell: But...

Wolfsheim: And I no zoom up and go boom.

Mrs. Effingwell: Yes, yes...

Wolfsheim: And I no swordfight in France...

Eckleburg: This is getting us no place.

Wolfsheim: I think we been there a while.

Gatsby: Honk.

Daisy (desperately): I love you too!

Eckleburg: You understand him?

Daisy: I went with him for two years, before he joined the army...

Mrs. Effingwell: I never knew...

Eckleburg: And here you were, accusing me of assignating..(He sidles up to her) On the other hand, I can imagine an assignation with you. An assignation so big I don’t think I could see round it...Is that all you, or do you have a Siamese twin? Don’t answer that.

Mrs. Effingwell: I don’t know what to say.

Eckleburg: Then count to ten and take me to your bosom. That’s if your arms are long enough.


Ultimately, Gatsby and Daisy do get together, but her horrible busband Tom  manages to break it all up, in an ugly scene that erupts during the film’s climactic party. Having guessed that Gatsby is probably a phony and a bootlegger, Tom decides to peel away his disguise in front of everyone:



Tom: An Oxford man, eh?

Gatsby: Honk.

Wolfsheim: He say he hate to brag, but...

Tom: What did he study?

Gatsby: Honk.

Wolfsheim: He study all about Cambridge.

Tom: He studied Cambridge at Oxford? How pointless!

Gatsby: Honk.

Wolfsheim: He say it make him very mad. So he went to Cambridge to study Oxford.

Tom: I think he never went to Oxford.

Gatsby: Honk.

Wolfsheim: How you explain-a the accent?

Tom: He doesn’t have an English accent.

Wolfsheim: Yeah, but he meet a lotta nice geese.

Daisy (running in): Jay! There you are!

Gatsby simpers with his finger in his mouth. Then she notices her husband.

Daisy: Oh! Tom! .

Gatsby: Honk.

Daisy: I do love you, but I can’t say I never loved Tom!

Gatsby (heartbroken): Honk.

Daisy: I’m so confused.

Tom (sneering at Gatsby): Hah!

Despairing, Gatsby produces one of those bug-sprayers that has a handle-pump and a cylindrical can, and proceeds to spray Tom and Daisy. They drop dead. He gets Mrs. Effingwell too, and moves on to the other guests.

Eckleburg (turning to the camera): The very rich are not like you and me.

Gatsby sprays him, then Wolfsheim, then himself, and they all crumple, twitching.



Now, the brothers, who’d been known to hobnob with Scott Fitzgerald at parties on Long Island, had expected to procure the rights, but they presumed a bit too much on their friendship, it seems; Fitzgerald came away with the distinct impression that his work was being mocked, and the negotiations collapsed...since a certain amount of money had already been spent, this proved the last straw for Paramount, and the brothers were left with no contract, the unfinished script, and the test footage. Ultimately, when they wound up at MGM, the script was completely revamped, and turned into Night at the Opera....some of the test footage that didn’t survive involved an early version of Opera’s celebrated stateroom scene, in which Gatsby and Daisy, hiding from Tom, wind up at Eckleburg’s tiny bungalow, and everybody from the party next door comes over and squeezes in too. But, unfortunately, that piece of film was on nitrate stock, and went up in a fire along with the last known copy of Lon Chaney’s London After Midnight...

God Hates A Bastard

 Okay, I was out of commission for a while there; I was born with a heart valve problem that wasn't too dangerous for much of my life, but I was told that I would need surgery at some point, and well, the time came, open heart, the works. No need to go into detail, but I didn't feel like doing much of anything for about a month and a half; when I did start writing again, I got back to work on the final Zorachus book. I'm back to running and weight lifting, although the full benefits of the operation won't really show for another month or two, or so I've been told. This is my first post since that Vikings piece; what motivated me was seeing this jaw-dropping movie that I'd been waiting much of my adult life to be blown away by.

I grew up on Italian Westerns, but the vogue for them didn't last too long Stateside; their popularity  here dropped off after Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, and a lot of the best ones either never got imported, or only played in places I just couldn't get to. But the fact is, the Spaghetti Western industry kept on chugging along well into the seventies, when finally it was kinda supplanted by the Italian crime flick explosion, which employed a bunch of the same guys. I never lost interest in the Pasta Oaters, though, and I kept on the lookout. When DVDs appeared, finding stuff got a whole lot easier, and I managed to collect a number of Italian Westerns that I'd only heard about.  Leone's films had always been readily available, but  work by the other two great masters of the genre, namely Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Sollima, was harder to track down. I only recently got my hands on .Sollima's Run, Man Run ( a sequel to The Big Gundown), and Face to Face, a very nifty, scary flick about moral transformation that's  The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly's only real rival for best Spaghetti Western.

Or so I thought until I managed to locate God Hates A Bastard.

I'd keep running across references to this thing, by people who were completely knocked out by it forty years ago, but hadn't seen it since. It came out in 1970 and was directed by Sergio Corbucci; rumor had it that it was even nastier than his The Great Silence, had attracted a ton of negative publicity, and had vanished very quickly. As far as anyone knew, it had never been distributed in the US, and it had been kept out of circulation because there was a dispute over the rights. I'd heard that it had been produced by Alberto Grimaldi, had music credited to Bruno Nicolai (his frequent collaborator Ennio Morricone apparently wrote most of it), and starred Klaus Kinski in one of his few heroic roles, as Hunchback Joe, El Penitente, a peon-loving religious zealot who walks around bowed under the huge hollow cross, filled with every sort of killing device you could access in 1913 Mexico.

Facing off against him is Gian Maria Volonte, the main bad guy from Fistful of Dollars and Face to Face, here playing Fulgencio Cicatrice, an especially demonic Huertista colonel...his men under constant attack by rebels, he responds with hideous reprisals, some of them quite imaginative, against the poor civilian population. He's also using peons as slave labor to construct a gigantic fortress....seems to be the same set that they built for El Condor. He's maybe Volonte's scariest villain ever, at least as frightening as the professor-turned-monster he played in Face to Face...his eyes simply blaze, and he's got this very memorable scar, an amazing bit of makeup, that runs from his brow right down his nose, and over his chin. Every time he appears, you simply cringe. He also growls some excellent villain dialogue that really comes through, even in translation, which is very rare...credit has to go to screenwriter Guiseppe Vivaldini, who I know nothing whatsoever about.

Anyway, things are going from bad to vile south of the Rio Grande, and into this situation comes the aforementioned Hunchback Joe, Klaus Kinski in full flaming eccentric mode, surely the most grotesque good guy that ever kicked ass in a western, Italian or otherwise. Of course, if you've seen For A Few Dollars More, you already had a primo Kinski hunchback experience, but imagine that character hybridized with the rebel priest he played in Bullet For The General, and you'll get some idea of what I'm talking about. There's also a great deal of Christ symbolism, as one might expect with a protagonist who carries a huge cross around most of the time. He preaches against Cicatrice, gets tortured extensively by leering goons, and doesn't fight back until about halfway through the movie...then all Hell literally breaks loose. This thing must be the single most violent Italian Western ever made. When Joe gets into the goodies in his cross, he has a particular penchant for blowing noses off faces, and the gore effects are a whole lot more competent than you normally get in Italian flicks. As the peons rise up, roused by Joe's especially sadistic brand of Christianity, we get a number of preliminary slaughterfests leading to a final shootout which is about as bloody as the demise of the Wild Bunch. Cicatrice comes to a fantastically gruesome noseless end, and after receiving many thanks from the peasants, Joe drags his cross off into a gorgeously lensed Almeria sunset...

And oh, I forgot to mention John Ireland, "In the role of Robertson." Ireland made a few of these things (he's in Run Man Run), and here he's a gringo gunrunner who plays both sides of the fence, but winds up aligned with the bloodspattered angels.

Corbucci turns in his best directing job; for my money, God Hates A Bastard is better than The Great Silence, Companeros, El Mercenario, or Navajo Joe, all of which it easily surpasses in savagery and sheer wacked-outness. In between unbelievable bouts of butchery, it's also frequently extremely funny and subversive. If indeed Morricone was primarily responsible for  the score, it's one of his very coolest, making haunting use of Gregorian chant;  praise to Mr.Nicolai too, if I'm not giving him enough credit. There's even a song (in weirdly pronounced English) that goes:

God hates a bastard
You know that it's true
And
If God hates a bastard
You know He hates you. 

The movie is also uncommonly good looking for an Italian Western. You have the same overused Spanish locations, but they're photographed at more interesting times of day than they generally are, and the colors are extremely vivid, even in my copy, which I suspect is a bootleg, although I'm not sure.

In short, get this movie if you possibly can. That might not prove easy, though. I bought it from some enterprise called Video Tiger, up in Canada, and I haven't been able to locate them since...

Been Watching Vikings

I got into the Northern thing back in high school...quite a natural progression, given my intense interest in Tolkien, Norseness being one of his primary inspirations. Anyway, I started reading everything Viking that I could lay my hands on.When, long about the age of fifteen or so, I started writing my own horror and heroic fantasy (you might have caught a flick with Peter Reigert and Alexander Gudonov called the Runestone which was based on one of my teenage efforts), I incorporated all sorts of Viking biz. There was a whole lot of that in Zorachus and The Nightmare of God, for example. I made a point of watching Viking movies too, such as well, The Vikings, The Long Ships, Prince Valiant, Alfred the Great, and a whole slew of Italian flicks like Erik the Conquerer. I'd say The Vikings is the single coolest Viking movie out there, with its  fabulous Mario Nascimbene score, and wonderful Norwegian and French locations, lensed by the great Jack Cardiff; the final swordfight between Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis  is absolutely classic. You might notice it gets rotoscoped into rat combat at the climax of The Secret of Nimh. But...

While the movie gets some things right, it gets a lot of other things very wrong...we have a great big stone castle in Viking age Northumbria, the clothes and trapping are your typical furry Hollywood barbarian fantasies,etc. Jack Cardiff actually helmed The Long Ships, which bears virtually no resemblance to the novel it's based on...it's a lot of fun but it sure is nonsensical, and the historical details are almost all bosh. Prince Valiant is a handsome production based on the nifty Hal Foster comic strip, and there's plenty of Viking action, but it has its Norsemen all wearing horned helmets, etc, and living in big stone fortresses. I only saw Alfred the Great once; it involves Alfred's campaign against the Danish Great Army, led by Guthrum and Ivar the Boneless...as I recall, most of the historical details were plausible, although the movie struck me as rather inept and boring. I suppose I should also mention a Charlton Heston movie called The Warlord, which is about Normans having it out with Viking-like Frisians...it's one of these things where the guys who made it were going to give you gritty lowdown on the Middle ages, and virtually everything about it is historically inaccurate...still, I love the damn thing, and the action scenes, staged by mega-genius Yakima Canutt, are among the best sequences of their sort ever done. Why it was deemed necessary to have the Vikings turned into Frisians simply beats me, but oh well.

All right then, when I heard the History Channel was mounting a Viking series, I was really looking forward to it, and on the whole, I thought it was pretty good, although the series finale, which I just watched last night, was rather anticlimactic. The single coolest element is actually the opening credits, nifty music over shots of dead Vikings sinking to the bottom with longships visible up above, speeding under oar. And for what it's worth, the representation of the Viking Age is the single most accurate depiction that I've ever seen. Certainly, the guys who it made seem to have been unusually serious about their historical responsibilities. The writers have read Ibn Fadlan (Antonio Banderas played him in The Thirteenth Warrior, a wacked-out we're-giving-you the-gritty-lowdown, wildly anachronistic version of Beowulf), and Saxo Grammaticus's account of pagan shenanigans at Uppsala. However...there's a lot of preposterousness too, some of which is is truly insisted upon. I can't imagine that most people would be as annoyed as I was, but they're not writing this blog, now are they?

First off. the show's about Ragnar Lothbrok (Hairy-Breeks), the same fellow played by Ernest Borgnine in The Vikings. He might've been a real guy...according to legend, he raised a lot of hell in Northumbria before the Northumbrian king Aella caught him and threw him into a pit full of vipers, whereupon Ragnar's sons, Guthrum and Ivar the Boneless, descended on England and went about making a big nuisance of themselves with the aforementioned Great Army (probably no more than five hundred men or so), before Alfred took them down. Now. Ragnar and his boys were Danes...but because Denmark is kind boring dairy country, the producers of the show have them operating out of Norway, with Canadian Pacific Northwest locations standing in nicely for that. Can't say I'm too upset...Ragnar et all were depicted as Norwegians in The Vikings as well. Makes for much better visuals.

But what are we to make of the notion that the vikings knew next to nothing about England, and were desperately afraid of sailing out of sight of land? This, of course, is pure twaddle...for one thing, Scandinavians could simply sail south along the coast and hang a right. Depending on where they hung this right, it sure wouldn't have taken them too long to get to Blighty. So there's that. But as I said, the show also has Norsemen skeptical that there even is an England to be plundered, even though so many folks from Denmark had wound up there during the Anglo-Saxon conquest. The invaders themselves are even referred to as wicings, Vikings, in Anglo-Saxon accounts. The Angles were from what is now Denmark, and the Jutes gave their name to the Peninsula, Jutland. The Anglo-Saxon national epic, Beowulf, takes place, of course, in Denmark and Sweden. In the show, Earl Haraldson is completely skeptical about Ragnar's plans, and a lot of conflict arises...in reality, none of this would've happened. In all likelihood, he would've put some money into the enterprise.

The show takes place at the dawn of the viking era proper, the late eighth century...it has Ragnar attacking the great monastery at Lindisfarne. Now while the assault on Lindisfarne was the very first eruption of the Vikings into recorded history, Ragnar had nothing to do with it...if he existed, he was from a later period...that's if he ran afoul of Aella. I don't suppose anyone cares...we're talking maybe fifty years here. In Hollywood terms, it's not much...in The Thirteenth Warrior, for example, you have Ibin Fadlan rubbing shoulders with Beowulf, which is kinda like Billy the Kid showing up in Braveheart.

But back to the show.

Some of the names are just plain wrong. Ragnar's brother is named Rollo...he should be named Hrolf, Rollo being the Frankish form of the name, as in Rollo, the fellow who founded Normandy. Earl Haraldson is peculiar too...Earl Harald would've been a better idea. Later on, we run into a  nobleman called Jarl so-and-so. Well, are these guys Earls or Jarls? Jarl is, of course, the Norse form of Earl. The writers should've stuck with the real title, or the translation.

There are scads of innaccuracies in the costuming, sets, etc. It's not like watching Xena,  but a lot of the gear is hopelessly unreal. For one thing, Viking-period folks (the vast majority of Norse people weren't Vikings, by the way, the term being pretty much synonymous with pirate) didn't dress too sumptuously or flashily. Their garments were pretty basic, not at all exotic...most of their bling would've been jewelry, things like brooch pins, armlets, stuff like that. Also, the Norse didn't quaff their grog from horns or goblets...they drank from funnel-shaped glass beakers, which were set in separate bases. The Norse had all sorts of imported glassware, by the way...they did a lot of trading with the Franks. Most of their swords were made by Franks, for example.

The show's geography is  frequently ridiculous...among other things, our protagonists go on foot on a pilgrimage to the pagan center at Uppsala, which is depicted as being right across the mountains from Norway or pseudo-Denmark, or wherever they're supposed to be...but Uppsala was located all the way in the east part of Sweden, near the Baltic...that would've been some hike. The show's goings-on at the temple have some basis in fact...the priests used to kill nine of each kind of animal, including human beings, during this one festival every nine years. But I believe the humans were slaves and criminals...the show has one of our guys just deciding he wants to be a sacrificed for no particular reason. It's very odd. Many of the details of the priesthood are purely invented, by the way...the priests are freaky pale wierdos with shaved heads, facial tattoos, and black lipstick.

Actually, the entire characterization of the Norsemen themselves is kinda off. They're all very solemn and grim. In actuality, if one can judge by the sagas, they were always cracking jokes and engaging in admittedly very violent hijinks. To give you an example...when the Jomsvikings all got drunk, decided on a whim to attack the Norwegians, and got trounced at the battle of Hjorungafjord, the Norwegians were going down the line beheading the prisoners...but one of the Jomsvikings had a last request. He was very vain about his hair, you see, and didn't want to get it all hacked and messy, so he requested that someone hold his hair out over his head as the axe fell. Well, this was considered reasonable, and someone poor schmuck held the guy's hair out...whereupon the Jomsviking jerked his head back at the last moment, and the axe cut off the Norwegian's hands.

The Norwegians thought this was so funny that they let the Jomsviking go...

Strange Takes On The Dead

I surf the web from time to time to see what people are saying about my books, and the one that gets the most attention is The Dead...even before Permuted Press brought their edition out, a lot of folks had expressed themselves, and after PP did their thing, there was a big increase in chatter...the book got more reviews (most of them really positive) than all of my other books combined, and there was a bunch of discussion on zombie sites. But even though, by and large, it's been good egoboo, it frequently makes for peculiar reading.

First off, some people are perplexed by the very idea of a Christian horror novel. The Dead has been called been called "A wierd mix of Christian and Horror themes" as though the two things are kinda antithetical. Apparently there are folks who've never heard of  devils, damnation, fire and brimstone, satanism. They couldn't have any familiarity with the Book of Revelation, and they sure as hell must never have read Dante's Inferno, which is horror stuff from beginning to end, really sadistic, rivers of blood, people head down in blazing tombs, dismemberments by demons, all sorts of good stuff like that. Medieval Catholicism was awash in horror imagery...take a look at some of the tomb-effigies from the period...the old memento mori was never far from anybody's minds. As a matter of fact, The Dead was directly inspired by Brueghel's painting The Triumph of Death, (post-medieval, admittedly, although you wouldn't know to look at it) which features armies of mummies out to the horizon, hunting everybody down and killing us all quite horribly, peasants, merchants, kings, popes...absolutely batshit terrifying. And of course, when it comes to modern horror, you've got Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Exorcist, The Stand...even in H.P.Lovecraft, Christianity is sometimes efficacious, particularly in the more theological Cthulhu Mythos stuff, before he decided to try and recast that in a science-fictional mode. As for movies, well...the Hammer vampire films were straight out Roman Catholic propaganda...the film adaptation of The Exorcist is one of the most famous horror movies ever...you get the picture.

On to zombies.

There's this melody that keeps cropping up in one horror movie after another...it was used as the theme in The Shining, for example...it's the tune for Thomas of Celano's Dies Irae, the Mass For the Dead...it's about the scariest piece of music ever, and it's all about the dead rising from their tombs on the last day. I bring this up because there's this notion that Christianity and zombie horror are particularly and peculiarly antithetical. A number of people respond to the very premise of The Dead, and ask, how can this possibly be? You don't have any zombies in the Bible, etc.Well, I might reference Ezekiel and the Dry Bones (I utilize that biblical bit in my book, actually) and also point out that dead people rise from their graves when Jesus dies...then, of course, there's the fact that the primary archetype for a zombie apocalypse is the Resurrection of the Dead, which is one of the tenets of the Nicene Creed. Well, in my book, the Resurrection is the reason the zombies are up and around. The good people have been Raptured off to Heaven; some mediocre folks are stuck here on earth (wrote this way before Left Behind, by the way), and they're coping with the bad resurrected dead people....earth has become Hell.  Now, all sorts of zombie movies have brought up the Resurrection and the actual Apocalypse, but then they don't really go anywhere with it. It evinces a lack of ambition, to say the least.

But even when some of The Dead's admirers have no problem with the mix of theology and horror, they're frequently rather ill-informed. I keep hearing that my zombies are byproducts of the Last Judgement or the Rapture. Nope, they're the direct products of...the Resurrection. Also, it's peculiar how many people zero in on the whole Rapture aspect of the book...it's a doctrine that doesn't even make it into the Nicene Creed, and while it has some scriptural basis, it was never a big part of the tradition---Roman Catholicism---that I was raised in. Oh, there are Catholic Pentecostals who are quite taken with the idea, and I thought it had some horror potential---it's really pretty creepy, and it's a handy prop. But first and foremost, this is a Resurrection book here. The Rapture is disposed of right at the beginning, and then...it's one damn brush with zombies after another. As a matter of fact, the whole end times schema that a lot of people are so attached to gets pretty short shrift...not so much because I'm making fun of it, but because the Antichrist and Second Coming etc., are not the focus of the book, which is living dead horror. The Antichrist is mentioned in passing...it turns out he's an Undersecretary of the Department of Education...I'm not making fun of Evangelicals...I'm making fun of the D of E. 

The matter of my Catholicism comes up with some regularity too. Some people seem sure that I'm Protestant, then pronounce themselves puzzled, because all of my lead characters are Catholics. Well, I'm a Catholic of a rather traditional sort, and by and large, the book reflects that. Admittedly, the clergy in the book are presented in a pretty negative light, and I've been accused of outright Catholic bashing...but the worldview that the book depicts is Catholic. Catholicism turns out to be true, even if certain priests suck...they've erred horribly in wandering away from it. There's a positive review out there that assures people that the book isn't a justification of Catholicism. I don't know what book that person read. I mean, I'm glad they like it, but...The Dead is about as in-your-face theologically as anything you're likely to pick up. It's primary purpose is to terrify, but that fits in perfectly well with the theological agenda. I'm a Roman Catholic fear monger. Jonathan Edwards, the guy who wrote Sinners in The Hands of An Angry God, might've been a Puritan, but I regard him as a kindred spirit. The fact is, if you really want to disturb someone, you have to get to them on some level where they think there's something authentic about the horror. Most people are religious; a lot of them believe in damnation, and while they might not believe in zombies, they believe in Devils.

Nobody but nobody believes in Cthulhu.

On the other hand, there are those who are so bewildered by the juxtaposition of God and zombies that they don't even classify the book as a zombie book at all. Some of them like it, but they call it an "apocalyptic thriller" or a "thought experiment." Now, some of this has to do with the characterization of the zombies...even though I use the term, my zombies are not much like the original variety, which were semi-sentient agricultural slaves. But Romero's zombies are also very different from the originals...Haitian zombies didn't eat you, for example...Romero's zombies seem to have somewhat more in common with Richard Matheson's vampires in I Am Legend. Well, my zombies differed from Haitian  zombies too, in different ways. Mine are smart, fast, and vicious, embodiments  of furious damnation, jealous of the living, and not interested at all in eating you...they want to kill you so you'll come back as one of them and share their misery. Moreover, they simply can't be killed, only crippled temporarily. Some people don't like this conception...oh well. My zombies are scarier than Romero's. I might also point out that John Russo, the co-author or the Night of the Living Dead screenplay, opted for fast mean zombies in Return of the Living Dead when he decided to take another hack at the subject matter...we arrived at the idea independently. In short, when you get folks that insist that The Dead isn't even a zombie book at all, it's rather laughable, in my opinion.

Finally, there are all the people who hate the book, hate it, hate it, hate it. I'd say about one in five readers get really mad. Generally it seems to be purely philosophical, because their analysis is so rabid and ill-observed. Now frankly, I can see how the book might piss some people off...but when they start claiming that the book is slow, well, that's nuts. They really tend to go overboard on the number of typos, even in the Permuted Press version, which was actually properly copyedited. They complain that the characters, some of whom are clergymen, have conversations about theology and the end of the world in a story in which the Last Judgement, the Resurrection, and the End of the World actually happen. They unload on the dialogue, because everyone sounds so literate, and "no one talks that way," even though three of the major characters are academics, and two of them are priests. Fact is, a lot of my closest friends are academics, my wife is a Doctor of Philosophy, and a lot of the lines in the book are drawn from things I've heard actual people say...some of the liberal theology is taken practically verbatim from utterances by priests from the Theology Department at Notre Dame. I've been in a number of exchanges that were pure set-pieces, almost exactly like Max's controversies with Uncle Buddy, and all of them unfolded exactly the same way.

Buddy's disquisition on Big Head Louis Armstrong figures, by the way, is based on a real conversation too, which took place a long while ago in a bar called The Flagship, in Seaford DE.

Just goes to show you.

Belated Django Unchained Review

Just saw Django Unchained...almost didn't go. I hadn't been too crazy about Tarantino's work after Pulp Fiction; thought Jackie Brown was just kinda dull, and that although Kill Bill  had some nifty action, the structure was awful, a series of big scenes, some good, some bad, with no real connecting glue, and an incredibly anti-climactic finale. Death Proof struck me as rather trivial, and also, in the theatrical version, they cut out my favorite thing, namely the lap-dance. Inglorious Basterds was yet another series of hit-and-miss sequences punctuated by insufficient amounts of admittedly excellent violence...the flick set up a series of expectations and then trashed a lot of them. Also, with its completely revised history (including Hitler being MP-40'd right in the face, and the Third Reich going down in 1944) the thing struck me as oddly reminiscent of Samurai Cat in the Real World.

Anyway, everything I was hearing about Django, even from people who liked it, who were the clear majority, made it sound like typical latter-day Tarantino, chock full of the characteristics that had begun to irritate me. To top it off, you had all that stupid racist crap about how great it is to kill white people from Jamie Foxx. Still, I decided to go see the flick...principally because I have an abiding interest in Italian Westerns, and I could see from the trailers that  Lone Pine California, where I'd spent some time, was used as a backdrop. I wanted to viddy the Alabama Hills, all that granite again.

But I'm happy to report that I got more than nicely-lensed boulders out of the experience. Django is absolutely my favorite post Pulp Fiction Tarantino. I wasn't bored at all, which I was during large stretches of Basterds...perhaps it has to do with the fact that the 19th-cventury setting doesn't allow Tarantino to vapor about movies. Oh, he can crib a bunch of Ennio Morricone tracks (they're "western" music after all), but he can't have characters running off at the mouth about The White Hell of Pitz Palu, etc. Moreover, the film frequently demonstrates actual narrative drive...it doesn't have the stop-and-start quality that you had in Basterds. Even though there are some narrative hangfires (the movie goes on too long), you're still pretty satisfied at the end.

Now bear in mind that, whatever Tarantino thinks, the movie isn't much like a spaghetti western. Just feels like a completely different sort of beast, vastly sleazier and more violent, and set mostly in the American south. However, Italian westerns were basically rather deranged fantasies, so Django does have that in common with them. Even though it works pretty hard to convince you that it has something on its mind, the complete lack of interest in certain kinds of verisimilitude makes it difficult to take the thing too seriously...it turns out that vastly separated areas of the US are strangely contiguous. Take that aforementioned Lone Pine biz. Supposedly, we're looking at Texas, whereas actually we're looking at the Sierras, which Texas is noticeably lacking in. At one point, as I recall, Lone Pine seems to be doubling as Tennessee. Then there's all this achingly Californian California stuff...gimme a break. It just makes the movie look cheap. Maybe it's a joke, but I dunno. And even if it is a joke, it's distracting and undermines the other material.

The movie's full of anachronisms and social arrangements that never existed, the most flagrant of which is the whole Mandingo thing, Mandingo fighting having been invented by a novelist named Kyle Onstott. In reality, you had slave prize fighters, such as Tom Molyneaux, but you never had all this gladiatorial fight to the death carnage...I'm not sure that Tarantino knows that, since he seems not to realize the difference between films and actual history. In his 1858-59 deep south theme park, he serves up dynamite, Henry Rifles, all sorts of cartridge guns,  ridiculous costumes, and that famous bust of Nefertiti, which hadn't been discovered (or forged?) yet. Nonetheless, I don't expect movie makers to get details right anymore. And Django frequently dispensed enough garish engaging nuttiness to drown out that nattering voice in the back of my head. I just found myself going with it most of the time.

Story has Django getting liberated from a couple of slave-traders by Dr. King Schultz (Cristoph Waltz), a German expat who abandoned his trade of dentistry a while ago, and has taken up bounty hunting, even though he still travels about in a wagon with a big tooth on a spring on the roof...there's some initial shooting that caught my attention immediately. Whatever his flaws, Tarantino really knows how to direct slaughter, and has the good sense to work with the KNB-EFX guys, the prosthetics experts who wanted to make that movie of The Dead... anyway, I found myself thinking that I would like the movie, if only it featured a whole lot more butchery of that caliber, and it sure did. Among other things, the movie realy clicks as an ultraviolent exercise.

But it's also funny and well written for the most part, and has quite a bit of excellent characterization and acting. Waltz (the SD honcho from Basterds) is absolutely mesmerizing as Schultz, and it's amusing to see a movie where the only decent white guy in the midst of all these evil crackers is an urbane, civilized German. He's more interesting than Django, but that's okay, since he serves as a mentor for him, and Django develops steadily under his tutelage. The two strike up an arrangement...Django will help Schultz hunt down the vile Brittle Brothers and then accompany him for a while as an apprentice/assistant bounty hunter, after which they'll go free Django's wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). It turns out that she's been purchased by the horrendous Calvin Candie (Leonardo Di Caprio) who maintains a stable of Mandingo fighting slaves at his plantation, Candieland. In what I believe is his first villain role (I might be mistaken) Di Caprio is extremely satanic, and you truly hate his guts, although he's partially overshadowed by his house-slave major domo Stephen, (Samuel L. Jackson). Stephen's real comfortable with the situation at Candieland, is smarter than his master, and gets real suspicious when Django and Schultz come around pretending to be in the market for some Mandingo talent. A bunch of cat-and-mouse ensues...there are some powerful scenes, most notably the reunion (overseen by Schultz) between Django and Broomhilda, and an increasingly nerve-wracking Candieland dinner. Ultimately, after much screwing-up of tension, there's an explosion of primo slaughter...

It's kind of a shame the film didn't end with that, though, and I feel the need to do some bitching. Spoilers follow of necessity...don't read any further if you don't want to know how things come down.

Di Caprio's death isn't sufficiently horrible. Oh, you have a nifty little tribute to Jack Palance's demise at the end of Il Mercenario, a "Zapata Western" helmed by Sergo Corbucci, the guy who did the original Django. But this rather pointless homage just isn't as spectacular as it needs to be, given the fact that Di Caprio is the head bad guy...his death almost reminds one of David Carradine's lackluster can-kick in Kill Bill, although  this is partially mitigated by the fact that various Candieland minions go out in much more splattery fashion.

The film just keeps stumbling on after this point. Not only has the main heavy been killed, Schultz gets it almost immediately afterwards, and he's our favorite character...my interest in the succeeding goings-on was drastically reduced. Also, following the huge shoot-out, Django gets captured, and is about to be castrated right the hell to death, when Stephen intrudes and stops the proceedings, saying it would be a more terrible punishment if Django gets sent to work at a mine. Gimme a break. Basically, this is a really feeble maneuver to keep our hero from being neutered/killed. No effing way....our disbelief is reinforced, in addition, by the fact that Django quickly escapes from his new captors (improbable Australians, one of whom is played by porky Quentin in a vest). This sets up a second killfest which isn't as cool as the last one, although we're glad that Broomhilda is saved, and the final confrontation between Django and Stephen is good.  You get a couple of excellent explosions too, utililizing that anachronistic dynamite, then some very sharp dressage from Django before the fadeout.

All in all, I had a good time, and as I said, I wasn't expecting to. The Oscars this year are going to be really interesting. I expect Django's going to be a major contender...but I also liked Lincoln too, and Argo...I'm also expecting to enjoy Zero Dark Thirty, though I haven't seen it yet. Don't think I care about Les Mis, but what the hell...

My Hobbit Review: Too Much Frog, Too Little Dinosaur

All, right, just got back from a midnight show of The Hobbit. If you follow this blog, you probably read my piece on what was worrying me about the movie ahead of time...I was hearing and seeing a lot of things that seemed really screwed up, although I was expecting some stuff to be cool. Well, in my opinion the cool bits were few and far between, and the awful stuff predominated to a fairly astonishing degree. I liked it less than I liked Peter Jackson's King Kong, and I really hated that. I think Jackson has turned into a megalomaniacal self-indulgent nincompoop who thinks that every idea he comes up with is fantastic. The first installment of his coked-out new trilogy reminded me, by turns, of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the Star Wars prequels, and Michael Bay and Stephen Sommers shit. It's just jaw droppingly awful for long stretches, and whenever I started to get into it, something moronic would come along to take me right back out again. After a while I just got bored, because I knew I was never going to warm up to it.

Of course, aside from the huge doses of preposterous bombast, the biggest problem is the padding. As I made clear in that other piece, I was extremely skeptical when I heard they were making three movies, and it turns out I had every reason to be. The original material simply doesn't justify this sort of treatment. The movie clocks in at two hours forty-five and only covers about a hundred and twenty pages of the book; moreover, Jackson sticks in all sorts of stuff that he and his collaborators simply invented out of whole cloth, or pulled ill-advisedly from Tolkien's LOTR appendices. It's almost like one of those horrendous Dr. Seuss adaptations. I keep reading reviews that bitch about the film being ludicrously faithful to the novel. Well, don't you believe it. A huge proportion of this dinosaur is frog DNA, just as I predicted. There's just scene after scene which has very little to do with the book, and even when you get a something that's actually from the novel, it's distorted and stretched and lengthened until a Tolkien purist like myself wants to scream. The other movies just weren't like this.

Of course, there are all sorts of things that suck besides the adaptation. For one thing, the special effects simply stink in a number of scenes...just as in Two Towers, the wargs this time are dreadful, but they're much worse than the ones in TT, badly designed and incredibly fake-looking. There's a chase sequence involving Radagast in which the wargs and Radagast's CG rabbit-drawn sleigh are sliding around in the landscape as though they don't have any contact with the ground whatsoever. Almost all the orcs are CG, and that's a real bad idea...the ones in LOTR were guys in really good Richard Taylor makeup, and they were just fantastic. Here they look like video game rejects, with Azog and the Great Goblin being especially cartoony. The trolls are lousy designs too...in fact, the only good creature effects are the stone giants, the eagles at the end, and Gollum, who's better than he was in the first trilogy.

I'd also been worried about the whole approach to the dwarves...when I first saw advance stuff featuring all those beards and hairstyles, I thought they were extremely goofy-looking, and boy they turned out to be. Actually, most everything connected to the dwarves was bad. I disliked Jackson's manhandling of Gimli...well, for the most part, the dwarves in The Hobbit are about as lousy, although in different ways. They butt heads, have burping contests, and talk about things getting shoved up jackses...but the main thing is that most of them don't have any real personality. Now, my chief fear going in was that we were going to get a lot of character-arc stuff and wheel-spinning about the dwarves...well, the film does spin its wheels like crazy, but only a couple of the dwarves come through even remotely, most notably Thorin, who's turned into a hunky heroic type quite at variance with Tolkien's version...I didn't think it worked.

Unsurprisingly, Ian McKellen's Gandalf is good, and Martin Freeman's Bilbo is too...it was nice to see Hugo Weaving again as Elrond. Of course, Elrond has a genuine part to play in the story. But we also get senseless cameos from Cate Blanchett and Chris Lee, and while I really love Chris Lee, there wasn't any reason for him to be in the film. Nor did we need the simply stupefying Radagast, who drives around in the aforementioned bunny-sleigh, has a bird-nest in his hat, and a giant streak of birdshit down the side of his face. Jackson really lingers on the birdshit, by the way. He also seems to think troll-snot is fabulous...after sneezing a big splash of it onto Bilbo, a troll mistakes him for one of its boogers, and Bilbo spends the rest of the scene glistening.

I'm not making this up.

Let's see.

I was pretty sure Howard Shore's music would be nifty, but he overscores a lot of the scenes, most of the music is a retread of his LOTR  soundtrack, and the only effective original theme is the Misty Mountains song. The scenery is frequently gorgeous, although a lot of the production design is wacky...the goblin-city is particularly ridiculous. One of the things I loved about Jackson's LOTR was the way certain settings looked like you were just hallucinating the settings in the book...none of that here, except for Bag End, which, of course, was in in the first trilogy. Tolkien himself never described much of Rivendell, so Jackson always had a certain license with that...but it looks even more gingerbready and silly this time around.

It was fun, however, seeing Bret from Flight of the Concords in a bigger role than he had in LOTR.

As for the action sequences, I'd thought there was a good chance they'd be great, and there are some snippets that remind you of the best action in the other movies. But mostly they just get unbelievably over-the-top and stupid. Again and again we have our protagonists falling prodigious distances and not getting hurt. At one point, the gigunda Great Goblin lands on them from a tremendous height, and they're fine. There are all sorts of slapsticky things that I can't even describe...the climactic orc-fight (involving our guys climbing up pine-trees which knock each other over and hang out over the side of a cliff) goes on forever and is reminiscent of the awful tyrannosaurs-in-slings vine fight in Jackson's Kong.

I have to say, the only part of this thing that I thoroughly enjoyed was the Riddles in the Dark sequence...Andy Serkis is great, and the scene hewed very close to the book. But boy you have to wait forever to get there, and it doesn't last long when you do.

I didn't see the movie in the 3D 48 frames per second version...since 48 FPS apparently makes everything look  videotaped, I'm pretty sure I'd loathe it...there are enough things for me to loathe about this movie as it is.

Oh yeah, that scene with the Great Goblin landing on the dwarves was in one of the trailers, and I mistook him for a troll in my previous piece. Mea culpa.

Samurai Cat Slideshow

Death Dealin'

Seeing as how I've got a ton of Samurai Cat art just sitting in my computer, I thought I'd post some...much of it was in that Youtube SC slideshow, but you'll get a much better view of the pictures here. A lot of them were done just for this or that convention, and if you weren't there, you didn't see them. Anyway, hope you get a kick out of them. Click on any of them to go into full slideshow mode and see everything much bigger.

On The Crag

Poodle Cut

Tomokato's Saga

Pool Of Sunlight

Bambi Avenged

Bushi-Kebab

Spaghetti

The Good, The Cat, And The Ugly

Shimura Comes Through

Alienated

Sword of Samurai Cat Cover

Samurai Cat In The Real World Cover

Shiro, The Oz Boys, Ubersaurus Rex

Strapped

Seven Samurai Cats

Kamikaze Curtis Kondo

Origami Ito And Sue

The Mouse Trap

Bikin'

Dragonfire

Shiro---Blazing Combat

Shiro's Anguish

Take My Hoard Please

Draw Cut

The Invasion Of The Kitty Snatchers

The Kremlin Litter

Shotgun Shiro

Tomokato Versus His Evil Nephews

Deadon

The Abominable Snowcat

A Fighting Cat Of Mars

Christmas Eve, Berlin, 1944

Dramatic Lighting

Tomokato God of War

Fun With A Browning Thirty

Katsucon Program Book Cover

The Adventures of Samurai Cat #1

Tomokato

Samurai Cat Portfolio 1 Cover

Have A Nice Day