Introduction
As a fan and disciple of The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 - 1968, Andrew Sarris’s standard anatomization of Hollywood directors, I return to it again and again for insight and succor. Unfortunately, the book has a cut off date of 1968, consequently containing no rankings and summaries for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and scores of other directors who emerged since Sarris’s book came out.

Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next several months, I propose to issue forth brand new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris’s template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris’s categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris’s book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. As with Sarris’s book, titles will be in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, The Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Less Than Meets the Eye, Flashes in the Pan, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out this dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris’s book.

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Lucky McKee
Ranking: The Near Side of Paradise

All Cheerleaders Die (2001, also writer); May (2002, also writer, music supervisor); “Sick Girl” (episode of Masters of Horror, 2006); The Woods (2006); Roman (2006, writer-producer-actor only); Red (2007)

In a different generation, Lucky McKee might have been a Douglas Sirk or a George Cukor. His focus and areas of sympathy lie wholly with women, their loneliness, and their suffering, especially those with an inability to fit in. He also has a fascination with lesbians, whom he incorporates into his films on a equal footing with his other characters. The times being what they are, though, McKee dwells in the realm of relatively low budget horror. But though he may have a visual affinity for the genre (and his movies are almost always visually polished despite their budgets), essentially McKee uses the flexibility of the horror film to explore the facets of women and their sociology.

His signature film remains May , an unrelenting profile of female oddity that tests even the viewer’s inherent sympathy. It could easily have been a Takashi Miike tale as it follows a woman (Angela Bettis) deeper into strangeness. McKee wittily includes in the narrative a horror film buff (Jeremy Sisio) who finds much more than he bargained for when he slips into a relationship with May, and who is then confronted with true horror. Though posters on the wall of the horror buff’s house suggest that Dario Argento is a premiere influence on McKee, his films actually link back more closely to ’60s and ’70s “closed house” horror films, from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane to The Mother.

Roman flips the paradigm. Though it is written by and stars McKee in the lead role, it is directed (on digital video) by Angela Bettis, his otherwise cinematic muse, and the film privileges a lonely male with a dull job and a hopeless crush on a neighbor (the always great Kristin Bell). Roman has the feel of an early script resurrected; it doesn’t have enough story for its 92 minutes.

“Sick Girl” blends the arch humor of the whole Masters of Horror series with the agony of modern dating (in this case a lesbian first date). If May was a veterinarian with strange fantasies, then “Sick Girl”’s Ida Teeter (Bettis again) is an oddball etymologist with an odd Jane Hathaway demeanor who at least enjoys a short period of happiness, at least until her new girlfriend (Erin Brown) is taken over by an “aggressive” insect that Ida receives in the mail.

The Woods expands McKee’s palette while remaining consistent with his fixation on lonely troubled women. Like the near-simultaneous The Covenant, The Woods is an “old dark school” tale in which a young woman Heather (Agnes Bruckner) is farmed out to an exclusive yet mysterious school where she is dropped among her mirror images. As a pyro, Heather of course also has red hair, which earns her the sobriquet “firecrotch” from the school’s “mean girl,” Samantha (Rachel Nichols). The Woods takes place in a vaguely 1960s world, with Bruce Campbell as the dad and lush romantic ’60s tunes on the car radio. Though less visually exhaustive than his previous films, The Woods broadens the context out of which his women emerge (Heather’s mother is a vain harridan) and through which they must arise (a closed matriarchal society). As in May, Heather manages to attract a sole friend, Marcie Turner (Lauren Birkell) who is really the May equivalent; Heather is too much the independent rebel and smart mouth. Eventually the school is shown to have huge (if uninteresting) secrets of its own, and its narrative resolves itself down a path that links it to Neil LaBute’s take on The Wicker Man and its secret society of outsider women. Fine as it is, The Woods’s narrative eventually seems to get out of hand, and it’s possible that McKee is more successful with a smaller tableau.

Few directors have imposed on themselves such a constricted vein to mine, yet on the surface McKee’s films don’t feel obsessive or narrow. Perhaps that is because thus far McKee has managed to maintain his integrity as a writer/director. His second tier obsessions — watching, and voyeurism from within the cocoon of imposed societal isolation — make McKee eminently worthy of obsession on the part of film fans themselves, who should be able to relate to his sensitivity to that emotional state. At some point, McKee will make a more mainstream seeming hit, and his name will cease to be an oddity among horror directors.

Can you believe that we are still arguing over Orson Welles? By “we,” of course, I really mean “they,” the critics and the pundits who issue alternating books and essays first defaming and then defending the Pantheon auteur. “We” remain serene in the fact that Welles continues to be one of the greatest filmmakers, whose work rewards constant revisits.

Maybe that’s why academics and critics return to Welles, to have an excuse to write about him, even if often their remarks are misguided or derived from Welles’s earliest advocates, such as Charles Higham, who started that whole “fear of completion” tangent of Welles’s biography.

Now, at the New York Review of Books, Mr. Sanford Schwartz enters the fray
in the March 15, 2007, issue and one is immediately relieved to find that he is a Welles lover, who writes that Welles has created “as rich a storehouse of images and moments as any American artist.” The official purpose of Mr. Schwartz’s visitation is two new books on Welles, volume two of Simon Callow’s ongoing Caro-on-LBJ-length biography, and Joseph McBride’s new book on his idol. Into the mix Mr. Schwartz also tosses remarks in passing on books by David Thomson and James Naremore, among others. If Mr. Schwartz, in the end, rather overestimates the value of Thomson (for his “across-the-boards account of everything that was failed, fraudulent, and self-indulgent about him”), and undervalues, due to what he ascribes to a “lack of affinity” for his subject, the contributions of Callow (who in his second volume has highlighted the full extent of Welles’s political involvements and their subsequent effect on his career), he nevertheless manages to cull and then add some interesting observations about Welles.

Noting the “emporium-like quality” of Welles’s style, Mr. Schwartz traces the “disparity between the stories Welles wanted to tell and the way he filmed them,” which results in a highly realist content presented in surrealistic form. Mr. Schwartz insightfully likens Welles’s visual style to Giorgio de Chirico and tracks how surrealism was “an underlying issue for many artists coming of age in the 1930s and early 1940s whether they were tied to Surrealism or not,” though he notes that Welles maintained to Bogdanovich that he was really an anti-surrealist (which isn’t necessarily a contradiction). Yet the inner, psychological realism of Welles’s films was also a sort of breakthrough in national cinema. His films are death obsessed (”Charles Foster Kane is encountered the second before he dies”), and Welles was one of those peculiar young filmmakers more interested in the aged.

Welles emerges from these books as a larger than life personage with a grim impatience for anything less than adulation and an indifference to the quotidian. The saddest passage occurs when Mr. Schwartz writes that, “Even Joseph McBride, a writer long identified as one of the director’s champions, adds some sorry details to the picture. McBride was in and out of Welles’s orbit for the last fifteen years of the man’s life, and he writes warmly about the director’s later activities; but he is forthright and honest enough to say that on some crucial level the relationship never clicked. When McBride asserted himself, initially, as a budding writer and filmmaker, Welles, he feels, was threatened and put on permanent guard, with the result that the younger man tamped himself down, and ‘always felt somewhat uncomfortable around Welles.’ McBride realizes that the director never really saw him as an individual, either.” In this, as in so many other ways, Welles resembles Kubrick, and one thinks of that sad passage on the Clockwork Orange DVD when in an interview Malcolm McDowell expresses a small degree of hurt that, once shooting was over, the friendship that he thought he’d forged with the director failed to bear fruit.

Do yourself a favor and catch Gone Baby Gone.

It has a lot not to recommend it. The film is the directorial debut of Ben Affleck, and first time helming by actors can be dire. Worse, the film stars his younger, shorter brother Casey, he of the many strange actorial ticks and vocal mannerisms as seen in Committed and Gerry. And it is yet another story set in the hysterical world of child abduction and pedophilia.

However, Gone Baby Gone also has a pedigree. It’s based on a novel by Dennis Lehane in his Kenzie-Gennaro series (the fourth of the five so far). Like the award winning Mystic River, it is set in the most rundown part of Boston. But Boston is a world that director Affleck seems to know well, and the adaptation, credited to Affleck and Aaron Stockard, a crony of Affleck’s who has worked with him as far back as Good Will Hunting, appears to be an accurate account of the book. The film has a terrific cast, from Morgan Freeman to Ed Harris, from The Wire grads Amy Ryan and Michael K. Williams (Omar), along with several new and invigorating faces, and one of my favorite character actors, Titus Welliver, here sporting handlebar mustaches out of a gay version of Deadwood.

Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) are a young couple that also works as private eyes, generally running skip traces and alimony payments. When a four-year-old girl is abducted, they are called in by the girl’s aunt (Amy Madigan) because their street cred might give them access to witnesses who otherwise won’t talk to the cops. They soon learn that the case is much more complicated than they expected. The vileness of the girl’s biological mom (Amy Ryan), a foul-mouthed shrew who lets the media attention go to her head, will evoke memories in local viewers of the 2002 case of the Oregon City girls Miranda Gaddis and Ashley Pond.

Gone Baby Gone proves to be an intense, gritty little thriller that would have made a great discovery if it had played on a double bill with a similar crime film back in the 1970s. It’s cousin, Mystic River, was a dull, slow, plodding, Oscar whoring enterprise with a big cinematic ego. This film is tight, efficient, with an ingenious plot, a good action scene or two, and several great acting turns. There is also a subtly funny parody of media intrusiveness in the last four minutes.

Flaws: Monaghan as the partner is mostly just a passenger on this ride. Occasionally the camera will start on Casey Affleck, say, driving a car, and then after wallowing in his looks and his sounds (which bring to mind a Joe Pantoliano with ostensible hair), the camera will pan to the right and you’ll be started to see that Monaghan is with him. She seems extraneous to much of the action. Once in a while the screenwriters will remember to give her a line to justify her presence in a scene, but otherwise, her character only seems to serve a function at the very end.

A larger flaw is also one that takes the viewer to the heart of what makes the film interesting. Basically, the movie flips conventional cop morality. Here it is the police who plant evidence and run the world their way, and lone public citizens who adhere to a moral compass. At the end, Kenzie lives up to a vow he has made, but every other character in the scene with him says that he is wrong, that the person he is trying to rescue is better off where she is. He does it anyway, and puts people in jail and loses his girlfriend. But later you wonder, why was he so adamant about his moral code here? Didn’t he, just 30 minutes ago in the movie blow away a pedophile as judge, jury, and execution, in a scene right out of Mickey Spillane? Where was his code then? Why is it so inconsistent? What are we suppose to take away from this film’s ending? Maybe the book makes it clearer, but despite these qualifications, Gone Baby Gone remains one of the most unusual and interesting crime films to come along in a while.

I don’t know what magazines are about anymore. In a typical Borders one can go to the traditional section, which has familiar newsy publications such as The New Yorker, Time, The Atlantic Monthly, and so forth, but if you stray to the left there are scores of thick but unfulfilling lads’ magazines with wetted-down movie actresses on the covers, or wander to the right, where one is confronted with tens of magazines with odd titles such as B East, Good, Plazm, Flaunt, Clear, Anthem, Fader, Dazed and Confused, Bomb, Bikini, Dont, or Giant Robot. There doesn’t seem to be a name for this new breed of publication, but they mix music, movies, fashion, skateboarding, and toys, at least for starters. One caught my eye the other day because it had Jack Nicholson from Chinatown on the cover. It turned out to be a special movie issue (themed “Hollywood Lost and Found”) of Stop Smiling , the “magazine for high-minded lowlifes.” Like most of the issues of this kind of newspaper that I’ve sampled, it proved to be thin, just like the mainstream magazines I assume it is supposed to counter.

On the cover the issue pretends that a package of interviews with screenwriter Robert Towne and producer Robert Evans provides “Lessons of Chinatown.” But in the actual reading they prove to be just another pair of chats with two already over-interviewed subjects. Towne seems especially put off by his interlocutor, coming across as desultory in his replies. When the interviewer asks him, “Was there any one moment in San Pedro that made you want to become a writer,” Towne says yes, then proceeds not to finish the answer, instead turning his response into a complaint that people in real life don’t wear hats as much as they do in movies. The excerpt from Towne’s intro to the published Chinatown script is way livelier. The Evans review is a rehash of material we’ve seen before in his autobiography and in the documentary made from it. In short, no “lessons” from Chinatown. On the other hand, the paper has a few new essays, one by Jonathan Rosenbaum on Lubitsch and Wilder, J. Hoberman on Samuel Fuller, and Paul Cullum on Preston Sturges, that are worth reading. The rest of the issue is all nightclubs, lost movie palaces, and the Hollywood sign.

The problem with this kind of magazine is that it doesn’t serve the reader, it serves the publicists who granted them access to stars, or the publishers who gave them free books. There is no reason on earth to profile dull human presences such as Bruce Dern or Harry Dean Stanton except that they happen to be in current projects that need publicity. A shortcut to evaluating an issue such as this one is to turn to the books pages. Here, there is a short list of 12 “key” books on Hollywood, and a passel of reviews of contemporary books. The Hollywood 12 is, quite simply, a list of bad or out-of-date books, few of which anyone should read. Even as a 12-year-old when I first started collecting movie books I knew these titles were moth-eaten: The Fifty Year Decline of Hollywood, The Rise of the American Film, Hollywood: The Dream Factory, and A Million and One Nights. The only books from the list worth having are The Parade’s Gone By, a readable if woefully out-of-date book on silent film, Picture, Lillian Ross’s subtly hilarious New Yorker account of a prestige Hollywood film’s production, and Additional Dialogue, the collected letters of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.

But again, this is all old stuff. New book reviews, such as they are, happen to be worse, however, by being untrustworthy about high priced items. I refer specifically to the glowing account of the Taschen movie series. Taschen is a German publisher of mostly art and what they call “sexy” books, many of which are good. In recent years, Taschen has strayed into movie-book publishing with mixed results. Two huge books on Wilder’s Some Like it Hot, and the career of Stanley Kubrick, are expensive but essential. But a series of director profiles has proved to be unbelievably dull. Covering directors such as Hitchcock, Kubrick, Antonioni, Polanski, and Michael Mann, they are flatly written, plodding career bios with little writing flair and few insights, and with, as usual, poorly selected cover art (a Taschen Achilles heel). In the interest of full disclosure I should say that I auditioned to write a book in this series back when the project was just getting started, but didn’t pass muster, and was certainly unaware of the direction the series was going to go. Here, the books are reviewed as “expansive meditations,” which is a disservice to the interested reader.

Another annoyance is designed-based. Almost all the articles are continued at the back of the book, but the remainder of the article is a mere sliver. Couldn’t the designer have eliminated at least some of the copious white space that graces the pages so that the articles were self-contained? But then, magazines such as Stop Smiling don’t seem to aspire to be read, but rather flipped through briefly before being displayed on coffee tables.

by Katy Such
I am just back from the cloudy, self-satisfied center of a metro Saturday morning: the downtown farmers’ market. Don’t misunderstand, I love the market and the five kinds of curled leaf greens I wrapped in their own damp paper towels and stowed next to the bumpy purple potatoes and marble-sized strawberries, but I could do with less smugness (seriously, people, it’s not necessary to wear earth-toned organic cotton and linen to coordinate with your handmade trug…they let you buy the food even if you’re wearing man-made fiber sweats).

I remember the farmers’ markets (then called produce stands, mostly) in the metro area in the 1990s. There was no fashion on display, no long, earnest conversations about lettuce biodiversity, just Pacific Northwest produce in plastic bags. But since our growing self-identification as foodies, there are now layers of subtext and identity present on these Saturday mornings.

Past the subsistence level, preparing food, eating it, and certainly writing about it is much more than calories and surfeit. Molly O’Neill (author and food columnist for The New York Times Magazine), in the Library of America’s new anthology American Food Writing (ISBN 978-159853-005-6, 2007, 753 pages, $40), nails an American culinary dichotomy: there is plain-spoken indigenous food, and then there is haute cuisine, or what O’Neill calls, “Euro-envy,” a jealousy and class awareness focused almost entirely on France (surely Americans are the only people on earth more reverential toward French cooking than the French themselves).

The collection deals in about equal parts with American food and Americans writing about other cultures (and a handful of essays with Europeans writing about America, including Brillat-Savarin fussing about whether he can get the right ingredients to cook the wild turkey he has shot in Connecticut). The anthology starts in the 1770s with Pehr Kalm, a Finnish botanist writing about oysters, (which appear many times in this volume – on a rainy Saturday, it’s possible to trace oysters’ progression from readily available native food to rarified, expensive delicacy. The breakpoint comes at MFK Fisher’s “A Lusty Bit of Nourishment.”). It ends with Michael Pollan exploding the comforting myth that organic food makes any appreciable difference to the earth in “My Organic Industrial Meal.”

The early selections about American food are generally earthier and more concerned with practicalities. Annie D. Tallent in “Bill of Fare on the Plains” catalogs dining during the westward expansion (a short summary here: there wasn’t a lot of variety).

As time and the book progresses, the selections become more self-aware and wry. Betty MacDonald writes about her dissatisfaction with her marriage using a pressure cooker metaphor – not quite as heavy handed as it sounds – and Betty Fussell mixes the 1960s cultural revolution with academic dinner parties (as it turns out, making mousseline de poisson would be very sexy if only it were not so exhausting). The indigenous American foods are what you’d expect – chowders, cod, cobblers, and all things dairy – and a few things you wouldn’t. O’Neill includes a selection from Joseph Mitchell (longtime New Yorker writer) called “Mr. Barbee’s Terrapin,” and more than one essay in the first third of the book waxes rhapsodic about the joys of canvasback duck.

The anthology is both less earthy and less intellectually rigorous when it deals with the heavy hitters, most of whom fall into the category O’Neill defines as the, “bon vivant club of gourmets.” You can’t really fault O’Neill – how could you have a comprehensive anthology of American food without Julia Child, Craig Claibourne, Alice Waters, and MFK Fisher? – but these essays feel familiar, and a little tired. While at the time of their original writings many of these authors were radical and new for Americans, by now we’ve read all this before. Roy Andries de Groot was one of the original fetishists of terrior, in a time when very few people thought about locality, and he writes about his experience in France with, as O’Neill says, “an almost mystical fervor.” His earnestly breathless style and minute descriptions of uniquely local ingredients and those cooking them are now mimicked in every issue of Gourmet, Saveur, or any of a hundred blogs. It’s hardly de Groot’s fault that he and others have been co-opted, but in these selections, any serious food reader won’t find anything new (unless it’s to observe that every generation of foodies is equally surprised and pleased to discover in their very selves a discerning taste and palate, and to congratulate themselves for it).

But these are quibbles. The usual experience of an anthology of this heft, at least for me, is a glazed-over quality, and a tendency to skip around randomly, but AFW reads like a consistent narrative and not a motley collection. O’Neill has a curatorial willingness to seek out writing, like the selection from Gertrude Stein’s “From American Food and American Houses,” with its five pages of blisteringly funny run-on sentences like, “You see he said French people did not like food moist, if it is moist then how can they drink wine, if the food is not dry there is no reason for drinking wine.” This eccentric sensibility in selection coincides with O’Neill’s discipline. She gives Waters, the saint of American local eating, ten pages on the currently very fashionable topic of the farm-restaurant connection, and she gives exactly the same space to the gay Southern Euro-expatriate Eugene Walter on the untrendy topic of gumbo and oysters in the 1930s. It’s O’Neill’s choices that keep American Food Writing fresh all the way through this significant addition to the food writing canon.

The disgraced Corvallis blogger isn’t the only cultural entity currently obsessed with Steven Spielberg. So is Entertainment Weekly. The publication’s shout-outs to the director rival the TV section’s Sound Bites obsession with the oft-quoted Conan O’Brien. A recent issue of EW, a special double issue, has no less than four passing references to the director. On page 22, Josh Brolin explains how Spielberg taught him how to act while on the set of The Goonies. Page 78 shows a photo (not online) of the Citizen Kane Rosebud sled that is in Spielberg’s possession. On page 94 (but also not online apparently), Spielberg offers a quote on the Eppers, a family of professional stunt people, where he is credited with calling them the “Flying Wallendas of film.”

(In a side note, the article says that the 2004 documentary Double Dare is about Epper matriarch Jeannie, but it’s not. The firmly Christian lady is in it, but as a mentor to the film’s focus, Tarantino-ward Zoe Bell.) Most ludicrously, on page 107 Owen Gleiberman starts off his review of We Own the Night with this bit of pretentious throat clearing: “A few rare dramas about crime, honor, and justice — The Godfather, The Verdict, Munich — have attained a mythological quality.” Huh? Munich? It’s a film of mythic stature among viewers? The political Spielberg movie no one liked? (And while we’re at it, why is The Verdict also in that short, short list? Is it even a family epic? If he’s talking about Boston, doesn’t he mean Mystic River?). Yeah, that Spielberg, boy, he makes people nuts.

My lengthy and detailed profile of Tim Lucas is up at Green Cine Daily, the must read, go-to movie news links page. Mr. Lucas is, of course, the author of the new and no doubt definitive biography and critical study of Italian genre director Mario Bava. And Mr. Lucas is also the editor of Video Watchdog, and both the magazine and the book, which is self-published, are designed by Donna Lucas. VW is a digest-sized monthly dedicated to detailed appreciations of genre films and their presentation in home viewing formats, and the magazine has distinguished itself by striving for the highest level of accuracy in its reporting. The Bava book, the project of a lifetime, aspires for the same accuracy.

One of the most delightful, curious, and original nights at the movies occurred last night (Saturday, October 13th) at the Cinema 21. That’s when, as part of the Gay and Lesbian film festival, Brand Upon the Brain! (the latest work by Winnipeg-based director Guy Maddin) screened to a packed house. BUTB is a silent film, but it is probably the noisiest silent film ever made. It comes with a live narrator (called The Interlocutor, last night played by actress Karen Black), a live orchestra performing the musical score (composed by Jason Staczek and conducted by David Hattner), a live foley ensemble, and a person advertised as a castrato, a tuxedo-garbed man who sits immobile in a cushioned chair to the right of the screen until summoned to sing two arias late in the movie. A film at the Cinema 21 has never sounded so good.

BUTB is a fantasia that blends elements of Shakespearian gender confusion with children’s detective novels and the silent serials of Louis Feuillade. It’s a typical Maddin cocktail of incest, cannibalism, fetishism, lesbianism, and homosexuality. The comical yet serious narrative finds an adult named Guy (Erik Steffen Maahs) on an island in the present searching for his past. The bulk of the film recounts an episode in which his mother (Gretchen Krich), who runs an orphanage in a lighthouse, comes in conflict with Maddin’s sister (Maya Lawson), who in turn is engaged in a romance with boy detective Chance Hale, who is really Chance’s sister, Wendy (Katherine E. Scharhon) in disguise. Eventually, sis stages a coup and banishes her and her and Guy’s father (Todd Moore), a scientist extracting brain juice from all the children to rejuvenate his aged wife. Back in the present, the adult Guy is almost reconciled with the ghost of his mother, but is distracted from saying a final “I love you” to her by the reappearance of Wendy’s spirit. The film is presented in Maddin’s usual pitch of jittery, barely controlled hysteria, somnambulism, and swooning the grace notes. In fact, young Guy faints about three times in the course of the story. ButB was shot in Seattle in early 2005 and backed by the Seattle-based The Film Company as the non-profit’s second foray into moviemaking.

Saturday’s performance was the third and final one over the course of two days, and the event was no doubt the highlight of the festival, if not movie-going in Portland this year. Karen Black did an amusing as the guest interlocutor. Others in different cities have included Crispin Glover and Laurie Anderson, and different interlocutors apparently can dramatically shift the tone of the work.

The person I was most curious about was the castrato, billed as Dov Houle, and introduced as Guy Maddin’s childhood friend. When I asked the conductor about him, Mr. Hattner let it be known that Dov Houle was the man’s stage name, and Maestro’s attempt to suppress laughter hinted to me that Mr. Houle was a participant in some kind of elaborate joke or ruse on the part of the always-playful Maddin. I tracked down Mr. Houle after the performance, and tuxedo-less he turned out to be a soft-spoken, youthful-looking man who conceded that he was there also as informal quality control for the absent Maddin (who was supervising a performance of the film in Seattle at the time). Mr. Houle allowed as how he was not a filmmaker himself, and knows Maddin via Winnipeg connections.

Later, I was able to learn independently that, far from being an adult singing castrato, a subset of humanity that doesn’t exist anyway, “Dov Houle” is really an actor named Dan Tierney, and in fact only lip-syncs his two songs to the voice of a woman singing off-stage. Mr. Tierney even appears in BUTB, as the child Guy’s new adoptive father, but is relatively unrecognizable under a full mustache.

Brand Upon the Brain is currently touring the country in selected cities, but will eventually appear on DVD with Isabella Rossellini providing the voice of the interlocutor. It’s well worth catching up with, but last night’s live performance was unique, a rarity whose like we shall not see again for some time.

Cinebuffs with a long memory may recall that a rare film, a silent adaptation of Richard III came to light in the Great Northwest about 10 years ago, not the first lost film to rise to the surface in this region. The print was eventually donated to the American Film Institute. Now, according to an ongoing, unfolding tale in a forum at the website for Criterion DVDs, another lost film may have turned up, this time in Tacoma.

The movie in question if F. W. Murnau’s 4 Devils (also sometimes listed as Four Devils). Released in 1928 or 1929 on the cusp of the transition to sound, the Fox production was a tragedy starring Janet Gaynor and set in the world of the circus (which kills interest in the film for me right there). I’m not sure yet how it came to be lost, but Murnau is considered not only one of the great silent directors, primarily for Nosferatu, the first vampire film, the Nabokovian The Last Laugh and Sunrise, but also one of the great directors of all time. A German émigré, he died young relatively young in an auto accident under circumstances that Kenneth Anger finds worthy of inclusion in the first edition of his book Hollywood Babylon.

In any case, someone started a forum thread at the Criterion site about “discovering” a lost film. The poster, using the handle 125100, announces that he has been going over the contents of a private collection in Tacoma and turned up what he thinks is a lost film, which results in his soliciting advice from the forum about how to handle the situation, which among other things requires convincing the collection’s owner to release it. Eventually, other posters were able to tease out more of the story and 125100 finally admitted that the film was Murnau’s 4 Devils. Bilge Ebiri of New York quickly covered this event.

But if you are a Murnau specialist, don’t get your hopes up. The news has not been greeted uncritically. Posters at the Yahoo forum “A Film By…” have expressed skepticism, and suggested that the announcement is some kind of elaborate prank or hoax, based on the poster’s unusual history at the Criterion site and elsewhere.

Just as I was reading up on this matter, be it “discovery” or hoax, I received in the mail the new Jon Lewis anthology Looking Past the Screen, from Duke University Press. Professor Lewis is the editor of numerous excellent film anthologies, among the, The End of Cinema As We Know It. Lo and behold, the next-to-last essay in the book is by Janet Bergstrom on Murnau’s films 4 Devils and City Girl as lost films. This is probably an excerpt from her forthcoming book about Murnau in America, but nevertheless offers a good introduction to the film’s place in history and the complex disputes lurking behind its production.

The story is still unfolding. Check back later today for quotes from Carl Bennett, editor of the website Silent Era.

In any case, the situation has caused much excitement in the world of film buffery. Nevertheless, Carl Bennett of the website Silent Era, and who is based in Seattle, Washington, not far from Tacoma, finds the idea that 4 Devils is resurrected dubious. Reached yesterday, Mr. Bennett said that, “There is still some question whether this story is valid. It appears that the fellow from the UK is earnest in his assertation that he has correctly identified the print. If so, and if the print is complete, this recovery of a Murnau film is more important than the recovery of Beyond the Rocks. Much of the archival community is aware of this story, and I am certain that qualified archivists are investigating the validity of this news. News that we all hope is true.”

In this, the first DVD Tray of Horror for the VV blog, which will cover numerous scary Halloween holiday films over the next few weeks, we start with Rise: Blood Hunter, a vampire hunter tale that hits the street today.

You sometimes wonder why prominent stars agree to appear in certain types of films. For example, what did Lucy Liu, Michael Chiklis, Mako, and Carla Gugino see in this project? What compelled their interest? An abiding interest in horror? A quick pay date for little expenditure of effort? The satiation of certain covert fetishistic interests? A few days free between TV seasons? A fear of idle hands? The answer is not found in the film itself.

The first thing you learn from Rise is that vampires are very sloppy eaters. This seems inefficient. If blood is their, er, lifeblood, then why do vampires flail it around like angry one-year-olds with colic? If the prized corpuscles are so precious, then why don’t they scoop them up carefully and not waste a carmine drop? It’s not very cinematic, I guess. Much more movie-like is a chick in a skimpy dress stumbling about with a dam-burst of bloody drool pouring down her chin and onto her chest.

The second thing you learn is that the modern vampire movie is a hybrid with its own rules and regulations. This isn’t the Dracula films of yore; these are hip, sleek horror engines that purr on an ethanol blend of Anne Rice and Japanese vampire hunter comics (among other cultural influences). As in Hostel 2, nude bodies are hung from the ankles for easy drainage. As in many a recent horror film, there is a dream-within-a-dream awakening. As in The Omen, there is a last minute murder as the police barge in. And as in virtually every horror film, it ends, in defiance of its own internal logic, with the option of a sequel.

And, like numerous other thrillers, the film can’t seem to get started. It has about four false starts. What transpires (when the film stops clearing its throat) is that Sadie Blake (Lucy Liu), an L. A. Weekly reporter who has just written a cover story on goth kids in a vampire cult, stumbles upon something she shouldn’t and is turned into a vampire herself. Supposed to be a really dead person, she finds herself waking up in the morgue (in a nod to Kill Bill), a member of the living dead. Instead of embracing vampire culture, though, she becomes a vampire hunter, briefed in the task by some Latin gurus, and begins tracking the decadent duo who trapped her in this world.

The story is told in the present tense, with parallel time flashbacks that give us Sadie’s back story, a sort of faux Tarantino affect, except that the chronology gets confusing at times. Occasionally you don’t know if you are in the present or in the recent past. It may not matter. Eventually helping Sadie in her quest is disgraced and drunken cop Clyde Rawlins (Chiklis), whose daughter, we eventually learn, has also been seduced into the vampire world.

Rise is a strange movie. Lucy Liu is a petite Asian who likes roles in which she has men at her feet or is crushing them under her boot for some contrived reason. In addition to this, here she also spends about 15 minutes of the movie in handcuffs. A whole essay could be written about the role of handcuffs in recent films, from the weird Dennis Hopper road film Catchfire (aka Backtrack), in which Jodie Foster is a often-nude handcuffed kidnap victim), to the recent Silent Hill. Chiklis is in a hit TV show (The Shield), and Gugino is a cult TV star. But the main villain is a vampire leader named Bishop (James D’Arcy, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World). Being a male vampire, he has, of course, a British accent, another cliché of the recent manifestation of the vampire genre.

The film is directed by Sebastian Gutierrez, the author of Snakes on a Plane, The Big Bounce, and Gothika, among other films, and the short-lived TV show, Karen Sisco (which may be why Carla Gugino shows up in this low-budget effort). It’s partially produced by Ghost House Pictures, which also backed The Grudge 2 and the forthcoming 30 Days of Night. In being so genre specific, it’s an unusual movie making company.

In the patented Joe Bob list of cult film features, Rise highlights a blood orgy, a knife plunged into booted foot, various crossbow arrows to various chests, gross arm chewing, bloody beds, a handcuffed Lucy Liu, and disgusting bullet removal.

Rise (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 94 minutes, $ 24.95, 1.85:1, DD 5.1, English and Spanish subtitles, street date Tuesday 9 October, 2007) comes with four small promotional featurettes, “Blood,” “Sex and Murder,” “Location, Location,” and “Stunts” (which come to about six minutes), four storyboard-to-screen comparisons, the trailer, and trailers for 12 other genre movies from Sony and its subsidiaries.