"How do you explain midgets? Or sock monkeys?"

Many years ago, I made the mistake of telling a David Lynch acolyte that I'd seen TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME and hadn't cared much for it at all. He asked if I'd ever seen any of the TWIN PEAKS series and I had to admit that I hadn't. "Well that's just STUPID," he remarked and, I gotta admit, he was right. FIRE WALK WITH ME presumes your familiarity with TWIN PEAKS and delivers a whole lot more to a fan of the series. Eventually, I put the situation to rights, watching the complete run of the series and following it with FIRE WALK WITH ME. I'm still not a huge fan of the last section of FIRE (as fantastic as Sheryl Lee's performance is, the demystification of Laura Palmer is a bit unnecessary) but I can definitely appreciate it more having enjoyed the two-season run of the TV series.

The main point of this ambling prologue? For this year's White Elephant Blogathon, I was assigned S. DARKO, the 2007 straight-to-DVD sequel to Richard Kelly's 2001 cult favorite, DONNIE DARKO. I've never seen the latter, nor do I ever intend do. Even before destroying my life by watching S. DARKO, I had no intention of seeing DONNIE DARKO. It feels like a thing that has come and gone and I had to be there to really appreciate it. (It didn't help that, at the time of it's release, most of the DONNIE DARKO proselytizers I knew usually tended to be people I actively disliked.) For me to watch DONNIE DARKO now seems like plunging head first into the Harry Potter books/movies or trying to get into Pogs or Pokemon or something. What's the use? The cultural relevance of these things diminishes daily.

Bull Spears

Plenty of animals were harmed during the making of Francesco Rosi's 1965 bullfighting docudrama, THE MOMENT OF TRUTH. Rosi's film is a blunt depiction of the sport and viewers are not spared the intrinsic buckets of taurine blood.

"You know how to sucker a guy in, don't you?"

The above still represents one of the more thrilling scenes I've witnessed in a long time. It's taken from ROUTINE PLEASURES, one of three components that make up Criterion/Eclipse's new Jean-Pierre Gorin set.

Paying Taxes Is Participating

For whatever reason, Alex Cox – the iconoclast behind Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, and Straight to Hell – has never quite enjoyed the indie godfather reputation of Jim Jarmusch or David Lynch. Having created several of the best American independent films of the 1980s, Cox dropped off the cultural radar after the commercial failure of the fitfully brilliant Walker – his single stab at a studio-backed, comparatively large-budgeted film. During the two decades since, while Cox has languished due to a self-proclaimed “blacklist”, he’s directed seven little-seen films.

Fortunately, Microcinema has recently issued a few of the overlooked films on region-free discs, hopefully contributing to a rediscovery of Cox’s work. Primary among these releases is 1991’s El Patrullero (“Highway Patrolman”), the first film Cox made after Walker.

An ISLAND Not on the Chart

Some Backstory: in the winter of 2002, I was on a classic horror kick. Thanks to the recommendations of my brother and my friend Barry, I’d seen Ulmer’s THE BLACK CAT, Whale’s THE OLD DARK HOUSE, and – most eye-popping of all – as many Val Lewton-produced films as I could get my hands on. Searching for the latter among the hallowed stacks of old VHS in Santa Monica’s Vidiots, I grabbed Erle C. Kenton’s THE ISLAND OF LOST SOULS, mistaking it for my intended rental, the Lewton/Mark Robson/Karloff effort, ISLE OF THE DEAD.*

It was a happy accident.

Death is Not the End

I very much wanted to (and still might) do another one of my illustrated blog posts indexing the awesome imagery that gives Victor Sjostrom's 1921 PHANTOM CARRIAGE its spiritual/visceral resonance. Instead, we'll all* have to settle for the review I wrote for GreenCine.

* That is, all two of us that read this blog (hi wife!).

I've delivered sermons to the sea.

Victor Sjostrom in WILD STRAWBERRIES (Bergman, 1957)