“The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren’t drawing an audience – they’re inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They’re stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie – for any movie – is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up. ‘There’s one God for all creation, but there must be a separate God for the movies,’ a producer said. ‘How else can you explain their survival?’ An atmosphere of hope develops before a big picture’s release, and even after your friends tell you how bad it is, you can’t quite believe it until you see for yourself. The lines (and the grosses) tell us only that people are going to the movies – not that they’re having a good time. Financially, the industry is healthy, so among the people at the top there seems to be little recognition of what miserable shape movies are in. They think the grosses are proof that people are happy with what they’re getting, just as TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for (a number of the new movie executives come from TV). These new executives don’t necessarily see many movies themselves, and they rarely go to a theatre. If for the last couple of years Hollywood couldn’t seem to do anything right, it isn’t that it was just a stretch of bad luck – it’s the result of recent developments within the industry. And in all probability it will get worse, not better.”

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All roads lead back to The Bicycle Thief, one way or another. Vittorio De Sica’s cinematic homage to daily life in post-war Italy represents the pinnacle of Neorealism – a landmark piece of cinema that still exists upon the primary plane between before and after.

The Bicycle Thief endures, in large part, as a result of its rich subtleties – the plight of a poor woman who is (quite literally) reduced to carrying water for her husband, the migrant worker whose only income goes toward paying off a fortuneteller, the honest man who needs to steal in order to keep his dreams afloat. These are timeless – perhaps even transcendent – metaphors, as broad and meaningful today as they might have been 60 years ago. Collectively, they lay the groundwork for a series of unexpected twists and turns that’ll more than likely lead viewers to question whether De Sica was really that far ahead of his time, or whether Hollywood has since taken to treating all of us like Pavlov’s dog.

The pace of The Bicycle Thief is slow, the tone is bleak. And yet, there is a buoyancy to this film that keeps the mood lighthearted throughout. Somewhere in between, De Sica manages to guide you through a stilted tour of Roman strata – the yes men, the radicals, the street merchants and socialists; the priests, the pimps, the lawyers and lawbreakers; the barbers, the artisans; the gypsies, tramps, and thieves; la pezzonovante, la famiglia, la Polizia e Mano Nera … each group fully present and accounted for. None of which is easy, given Cesare Zavattini’s screenplay was adapted from a novel largely hinged upon morality.

If Shoeshine was De Sica’s springboard, then The Bicycle Thief was his capolavoro. This film is still ranked No. 33 on Sight & Sound’s Top 50 Movies of All-Time. It’s been cited as a major influence by every director from Woody Allen to Federico Fellini. And certain sequences have even been revisited by the likes of Steven Spielberg and Bruce Springsteen (among others).

Bottom Line: The Bicycle Thief was, is, and probably always will be the charming little indie people look to in order to understand how and why every other charming little indie still needs to be made. Please do check it out. It’s even better than you know.

(The Bicycle Thief is currently streaming on both Netflix and YouTube.)  Continue reading →

“It is not that Los Angeles is altogether hideous, it is even by degrees pleasant, but for an Easterner there is never any salt in the wind; it is like Mexican cooking without chile, or Chinese egg rolls missing their mustard; as one travels through the endless repetitions of that city which is the capital of suburbia with its milky pinks, its washed-out oranges, its tainted lime-yellows of pastel on one pretty little architectural monstrosity after another, the colors not intense enough, the styles never pure, and never sufficiently impure to collide on the eye, one conceives the people who live here – they have come out to express themselves, Los Angeles is the home of self-expression, but the artists are middle-class and middling-minded; no passions will calcify here for years in the gloom to be revealed a decade later as the tessellations of hard and fertile work, no, it is all open, promiscuous, borrowed, half bought, a city without iron, eschewing wood, a kingdom of stucco, the playground for mass men – one has the feeling it was built by television sets giving orders to men. And in this land of the pretty-pretty, the virility is in the barbarisms, the vulgarities, it is in the huge billboards, the screamers of the neon lighting, the shouting farm-utensil colors of the gas stations and monster drugstores, it is in the swing of the sports cars, hot rods, convertibles, Los Angeles is a city to drive in, the boulevards are wide, the traffic is nervous and fast, the radio stations play bouncing, blooping, rippling tunes, one digs the pop in a pop tune, no one of character would make love by it, but the sound is good for swinging a car, electronic guitars and Hawaiian harps.”

If you are either from or of the Philadelphia area, chances are you know much better than to bring up Mumia Abu-Jamal in mixed company. From a distance, the Mumia case might appear to be a harsh study in race politics … completely polarizing along surface lines. But a closer inspection reveals there’s something much deeper at work here; something indicative of the ongoing struggle between institutional thought and revolutionary opposition.

Was Mumia Abu-Jamal guilty? Was he a victim of the system? Should Mumia be afforded the right to a new hearing? Despite the fact Mumia was both tried and convicted more than 30 years ago, the public outcry – ringing out across both bows – has not quieted one smidgeon in the three decades since. At the center of it all is Mumia himself, left to rot in Mahanoy Prison, after his death sentence was commuted in early December, 2011.

As a result of his incarceration, Abu-Jamal has come to symbolize much more than he ever might have on the outside. Yet, the man is still considered an irrepressible scourge by local critics, many of whom (e.g., Buzz Bissinger, Michael Smerconish, and Ed Rendell among them) refused to be interviewed for Revolutionary, a documentary which – despite some effort on the part of Stephen Vittoria – falls decidedly pro-Mumia.

Long-Distance Revolutionary does not concern itself with whether Mumia is innocent or guilty. It does not dawdle over evidence, nor devote more than a few spare frames to the early morning hours of December 9, 1981 – hours during which Mumia was subsequently convicted of shooting Daniel Faulkner at close range. Instead, the film tends to focus on who and what Mumia was in the years leading up to his arrest, and – more importantly – who and what he has become in the years since. Vittoria covers Mumia’s induction into the Black Panthers, his affiliation with the MOVE Organization, as well as his rise to become President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and his well-documented fall from grace. Revolutionary plays that off the strong-arm tactics of Frank Rizzo, a pair of ultra-violent confrontations between Philadelphia Police and the MOVE Organization, and the ongoing prevalence of white supremacist beliefs originally outlined in The Philadelphia Negro.

If Long-Distance Revolutionary is striving to make any case, it is the case for what Mumia Abu-Jamal could have been … would have been, had it not been for violent waves of hatred; had Abu-Jamal continued his ascent, had he not been black-balled by bureaucracy, spurned completely by white colleagues … had he not been parked along the dark side of 12th & Locust on that cold and fateful evening; or – perhaps better still – had that cold and fateful evening never happened altogether.

The only real sticking point being, it did.

It did.

And, depending upon your perspective, that is either the eternal shame or the eternal rub of it.

(Mumia: Long-Distance Revolutionary opens this Friday, February 1st, at New York City’s Cinema Village.)  Continue reading →

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Somewhere – and I mean somewhere deep – inside the movie Knife Fight, there is a well-constructed, albeit infinitely retold, play on morality. Unfortunately, the screenplay feels so bloated, it completely fails to make the point. Here we find some slick pol’s wife, refusing to let his team of handlers “Kobe Bryant” a young girl. There we find the slick pol himself, uncertain whether to go “Sonny or Michael” on said young girl’s ass.

In one way or another, the screenwriters of this film (Bill Guttentag, Chris Lehane) are guilty of stealing from just about every worthwhile movie or TV show that’s come along during the past 40 years. “You have to be the one who’s prepared to bring a gun into a knife fight.” (The Untouchables). “I once dreamed of playing shortstop for the Giants.” (The Sopranos).  “Zero. That’s my offer.” (The Godfather, Pt. II). “This is a no-spin zone.” (The O’Reilly Factor). Combine that with an entire rogue’s gallery of caricatures built out of presidential composites dating back to 1920, and it all adds up to a grossly unoriginal screenplay, written with unoriginal flair, starring unoriginal actors, many of whom are more than game to reprise hybrids of their roles from a long-deceased TV series.

Not good. Not good at all, I’d say. Perhaps even worse when you consider this alphabetized list of 15 completely over-the-top metaphors Knife Fight uses to describe what running an average political campaign might feel like:

1. A bare-knuckle brawl
2. Blood sport
3. Bringing a gun into a knife fight
4. Jihad
5. A legal colonoscopy without anesthesia
6. Major League Baseball
7. Making kings and queens
8. Making the news
9. Making the world a better place
10. A military guy in Virginia piloting a drone over Afghanistan, launching a missile
11. The NFL
12. Running a con
13. Running a Red Sox flag up Yankee Stadium
14. A steel-cage death match
15. A video game.

Despite all of this, I would be remiss if I did not mention how utterly fantastic Carrie Anne-Moss is in this film. She somehow manages to rise above the mediocrity, delivering a delightful turn that is both welcome and refreshing, to say the least.

(Knife Fight opens in select cities this Friday, January 25th, and will also be available via the majority of OnDemand platforms as of January 28th.)  Continue reading →

You know that friend whose tastes are highly suspect? Whose interests run afoul? Who laughs out loud at subtitles? Who loves Norwegian death metal?

This, this is the friend who Don Coscarelli made John Dies at The End for. What is John Dies at the End? Glad you asked. John Dies at the End is a good old-fashioned mindfuck; a psychotropic leap into the rabbit hole, complete with parallel planes of being and bad guys built out of lunch meat.

Is it good? Why, no, it sure isn’t. Not by any reliable standards, at least. The lead acting is abysmal, the comic timing’s even worse, and the dialogue’s trying way too hard to force something in between. In fact, the only bright spot here would have to be Paul Giamatti – a full-on Oscar nominee whose reasons for agreeing to appear in this film are actually more intriguing than the film itself.

John Dies was both adapted and directed by Coscarelli, whose previous claim to fame was Bubba Ho-Tep. This allows for a key distinction, in that Bubba Ho-Tep is a cult classic, while John Dies is really nothing more than a cult film.

Believe me when I tell you there’s a whole world of difference between the two.

(John Dies at the End arrives in limited release this Friday, January 25th. It is also currently available via Video OnDemand.) Continue reading →

“The British satirist Auberon Waugh once wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph asking readers to supply information about his life between birth and the present, explaining that he was writing his memoirs and had no memories from those years. I find myself in the opposite position. I remember everything. All my life I’ve been visited by unexpected flashes of memory unrelated to anything taking place at the moment. These retrieved moments I consider and replace on the shelf. When I began writing [Life Itself}, memories came flooding to the surface, not because of any conscious effort but simply in the stream of writing. I started in a direction and the memories were waiting there, sometimes of things I hadn’t consciously thought about since. Hypnosis is said to enable us to retrieve past memories. When I write I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just there. I think of the next word no more than the
composer thinksof the next note.“

1. Your entire ideology is based on dated precepts. Let us assume for a moment you’re a young parent, trying to decide where to send your first-born child off to school. There are any number of variables that might enter into that equation, including: each school’s local district, full-time faculty, special services, demographics, cost, facilities, state resources, rating, ranking, reputation, test scores … the list goes on and on. Here’s one factor that no person in his or her right mind would ever consider when weighing the pros and cons of a decision like that: What the young parents of a first-born child way back in 1776 might do. Do you know why no person in his or her right mind would ever think to consider a hypothetical like that? Because time is progress. That’s why. And progress alters context. I mean, who among us would opt to carry water, assuming we had full access to a sink? Who among us would rely on hearsay, assuming there was DNA evidence to the contrary? Who among us would allow some half-ass crank to cut us open with a bucksaw, assuming there was an entire team of surgeons in the waiting room next door? 

As a general rule: Before attempting to defend your modern stance with ancient precepts, take out a legal pad and make a list of every leap in evolution that has occurred between that time and now. I guarantee you’ll run clear out of space long before you’ve had a chance to reconsider.

2. You protect the indefensible, while casting out the bold and honest. Regardless of whether one’s referring to an institution or an organization; an infrastructure or a corporation, the very same logic still applies: From the moment a ruling body begins rewarding its at-fault members, while simultaneously shunning those who speak to truth to power, it slowly shifts to operating from a cowering position of fear. This is the real-world equivalent of placing one’s finger in the dike to keep the entire dam wall from falling. When, at last, all that sorry shit comes crashing down (and believe me when I tell you all that sorry shit will come crashing down) this despicable type of behavior never, ever winds up boding in the ruling body’s favor. 

As a general rule: “If Woody had gone right to the Police, this would never have happened.”

3. Your membership is based more on exclusion than inclusion. At its essence, this dynamic is the unfortunate result of age-old institutions tending to splinter over time, creating a critical divide between rival factions: young versus old, tradition versus progress, liberal versus conservative, etc. Despite the fact every faction remains loyal to the core, the central house is still divided. For a time, the village elders will endure. They’ve earned their just deserts, after all. And – more to the point – they incorrectly assume that seniority alone will be enough to keep the fringe elements at bay. Meanwhile, these emeritus members have grown so eerily out of touch with their staunch base, it not only renders their crass cloud-screaming null and void, it may also render the entire charter in contempt. 

As a general rule: Any organization that has gone to extreme lengths to keep the homosexuals out and the pedophiles in is almost definitely an archaic – if not altogether irrelevant – institution. Which, of course, brings us to …

4. Your arguments are so short-sighted as to diminish all credibility. In a day-to-day sense, these arguments represent the little white lies most people tell themselves to avoid a deeper inventory. “I believe it because God tells me so.” “I did it because I love this country.” “The only answer is more guns.” We’ve seen this type of entertainment through and through … so many times it’s laughable, in fact. More often than not, this unique brand of logic actually causes membership to soar, as people rally around the rote convenience of it all. But eventually, the entire ruse gives way to reason. In its wake, what one is left with is the desperate, gut-sick feeling that he or she has been Chuck-Ponzied, made the fool, wholly duped in the false service of someone else’s agenda. 

As a general rule: Any organization that is not a well-known branch of the military, yet still dedicates a ridiculous amount of time and resources to “recruiting” new members, is more than likely an archaic – perhaps even harmful – organization. 

5. You refer to any higher moral standing as being “elitist.” There is a reason intellectuals are called intellectuals. It’s because they’re pretty smart. Intellectuals who are not smart go by a different name. Those people are called faux intellectuals. Faux intellectuals – by definition – are not so intelligent. But they very often put themselves out there to be. Example: Every time some windbag takes to pulpit, describing intellectuals as an unsavory group of assholes who ride the subway while thumbing their noses at the status quo, not only tips the audience to the low brow of his hand, he simultaneously reveals himself to be … a faux intellectual. Fancy that. 

As a general rule: If you seem completely hung up on how horribly aloof the mainstream intellectuals are, then take heed. For you are more than likely the furthest possible thing from an intellectual on the modern evolutionary scale.  

6. You’re almost exclusively quoting dead people. Not that there’s anything wrong with dead people. I mean, let’s be honest, there’s a whole lot more of the deceased out there than there is living, and that distance keeps on growing every day. But it’s also worth noting that each and every deceased person out there was once living in a time and  place that is now completely gone, during which an entire laundry list of brain-dead concepts did very readily apply. This is by no means an effort to discredit the past and/or the practical utility of history. But it is to say that every argument requires more than some weak catchphrase, tagline, or slogan – taken almost wholly out of context – in order to hold weight. 

As a general rule: If your only justification for action (or a general lack thereof) is based upon some tagline from a fallen hero – lifted wholly out of context, several decades after the fact – now may be a good time to reevaluate what you’re fighting for.

7. You fail to make any worthwhile distinction between being an American and being in the right. Acknowledging there is a clear difference between the two does not necessarily mean someone: A) hates America, or B) loves America any less than a person who believes the polar opposite. All it really means is that we – as Americans – are fully capable of making mistakes. Keep in mind, this is a country that once sentenced its poor people to death, for fear they might afflict us all with epilepsy. It’s a country that once lynched its own black citizens for little more than random sport. It’s a country that once rounded up its Japanese and confined them to internment camps. Was that wrong? Sure. But it happened. And upsetting though it may be, you really can’t label that type of behavior as being anything but American. There is no shame in admitting culpability, even if that culpability just so happens to exist upon the most biblical of scales. At our best, we as a people learn from our mistakes and continue moving forward. At our worst, we sweep those inconvenient truths beneath the stars and stripes, doomed to repeat them time and time again, until the pain is too much to bear. 

As a general rule: If you regularly tend to read, quote, or forward unsubstantiated emails, written by anonymous sources in 19 different fonts and colors, you more than likely make no worthwhile distinction between being an American and being in the right.