Ask FlickChick

I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.

Halloween — my absolute favorite holiday of the year — is right around the corner and one of my favorite genre films of this year is debuting on DVD: How perfect a confluence is that?

Slither received what I call a "hit and run" release: If you didn't see it the week it opened, you probably didn't see it at all. And it did a fast fade despite unusually good reviews. So maybe the studios that don't bother to screen horror movies in advance are right: Nothing critics say about them, good or bad, can sway the hard-core genre audience.

Why that audience didn't turn out for it I can't say, because Slither pulls off two of the toughest tricks in the filmmaking book. First, it successfully mixes humor and horror — note the emphasis on the word "successfully." For every An American Werewolf in London there are dozens of movies that get the proportions wrong and wind up flopping miserably between two genres. And secondly, it's a great, self-referential homage to horror films of the 1970s and '80s, one that can stand on its own two feet.

Bucolic Little Wheelsy is the quintessentially quiet small town filled with sordid secrets, ripe to be plunged into chaos by a night caller from outer space. So naturally, the meteor that lands in the Wheelsy woods is carrying a gelatinous space slug intent on world domination. It hijacks the body of Grant Grant (Michael Rooker, of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer fame), the kind of bullying local-guy-made-good whom no one is especially sorry to see harm befall, and uses him to incubate an army of space slugs. They slither off to infect the townsfolk, one by bloody one, and next thing you know the fate of the Earth rests on the shoulders of Grant's trophy wife, as well as those of the easygoing local sheriff (Nathan Fillion) and a plucky teen who survived a close encounter of the disgusting kind.

Generally speaking, I like my horror straight. But Slither made me snicker and squirm. Writer-director James Gunn (who wrote the 2004 remake of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead) piles on the in-jokes and nods to films ranging from the famous — Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Blob (1958), Night of the Living Dead (1968), They Came from Within (1976) — to the obscure — notably killer-worm slimefest Squirm (1976) and Night of the Creeps (1986), itself a deceptively perky horror pastiche with a dark sense of humor. But he also knows how to stage a suspense sequence and how to set up punch line.

So what's the difference between a homage and a rip-off?

There are two schools of thinking on humor and horror, both of which start with the fact that laughter relieves tension. One school believes that fright-film audiences need some downtime between scares, the other holds that the scares are the whole point and there's no room in the spookhouse for mirth.

Most of today's horror filmmakers look to the '70s for inspiration: movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween[, Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, Suspiria, The Wicker Man, Black Christmas, The Amityville Horror, It's Alive, The Exorcist and The Omen. So why did the '70s spawn such a bumper crop of influential horror pictures? And does the fact that almost all the above films have been remade or are in the process of being remade mean that creativity is dead in the horror genre?

Remember: Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Previous DVD blogs:

Sunset Blvd.

In Cold Blood

Brick

Also: This Week's New DVD Releases

Question: What's with all the acting "packs" — who comes up with these names and why? — Josh

FlickChick: Journalists love a catchy phrase, though by all accounts the one that started it all wasn't coined by a journalist, only appropriated. Husky-voiced Lauren Bacall, then married to Humphrey Bogart, apparently bestowed the term on a bunch of her husband's hard-drinking, late-night poker buddies — can't you just hear her? But the phrase really took off when it was applied to the original kings of cool: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop — plus Angie Dickinson and Shirley MacLaine, the ladies' auxiliary. They made movies together (including the original Ocean's Eleven), they did Vegas shows together, drank in super-swinging nightclubs together, and talked in that ring-a-ding patois that made everyone else feel tragically unhip.

After their day was done, the "__at Pack" construction had a good long rest, 20—some years' worth.

Then along came St. Elmo's Fire (1985) and a New York Magazine article by David Blum that slapped the label "Brat Pack" on its stars: Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy and Andrew McCarthy. The "brat" part alluded both to their youth and a certain tendency to act out in public (though next to the likes of Tara Reid, they were positive models of decorum), and the pack numbered eight: Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald were also included.

Some 20 years after that, I ran into the next iteration, the "Frat Pack," a coinage attributed to USA Today entertainment writer Susan Wloszczyna, and refers to the seven-man posse of Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell, Owen and Luke Wilson (tell me he didn't get in on his brother's coattails), Jack Black and Steve Carell (but not Adam Sandler, oddly — I don't quite know what to make of that), overgrown frat boys all. I like "Slack Pack" (a variation of Entertainment Weekly's "Slacker Pack"), but you can't fight a wave.

I've recently started seeing references to the "Splat Pack," which charter member Eli Roth attributes to my good friend Alan Jones, who's been covering the genre scene since before many of its current stars were old enough to sneak into an R-rated gorefest. Go, Alan (oh, and if you're at all interested in horror movies, check out his new book, The Rough Guide to Horror). It puts an umbrella over the new crop of extreme horror directors (no doubt to keep the blood off), including Rob Zombie, Alexandre Aja, Darren Lynn Bousman, James Wan and Neil Marshall.

So I put it to you — what other packs are out there waiting to be named? Rest assured that the next time I find myself talking about Max Julien, Ron O'Neal, Antonio Fargas, Roscoe Orman and Rudy Ray Moore — hey, it happens — I'll call them the "Mack Pack."

Question: I think I've exhausted all my resources trying to come up with the name of a movie I saw part of last year on Encore. It was pretty recent — I'd say the past three years or so — and in the part I saw, a boy is in bed and his mother comes in to check on him. I remember reading the movie description, the gist of which was something like "crazy family, especially mom, tries to keep son paralyzed son bedridden." I know this sounds bizarre and terrible, but it was a comedy. I thought it had a strange name like Running with Scissors or Strangers with Candy, but I know it's neither. Can you help? — Jill

FlickChick: I believe I can. I think you saw part of The Safety of Objects (2003), adapted from a short story collection of the same title by A.M. Homes and directed by Rose Troche (Go Fish). Troche wove ten stand-alone stories together into a single tangled narrative involving four troubled suburban families. In one story thread, a mother (Glenn Close) is caring for her comatose son (Joshua Jackson) at home; I suspect that's where you came in. The excellent cast includes Dermot Mulroney, Patricia Clarkson, Moira Kelly and Mary Kay Place.


Send your questions to FlickChick.

I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.

Two of the most anticipated shows of the Fall TV season, 30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, are behind-the-scene shows about the inner workings of television. The mixed reviews accorded both got me thinking about behind-the-scenes movies about movie making, which have a similarly inconsistent track record. And that got me thinking about Sunset Blvd. (1950), an acid-tipped elegy for casualties of the boulevard of broken dreams. Not to mention a font of lines that have kept generations of drag queens in material, including "I am big. It's the pictures that got small" and "All right, Mr. DeMille. I'm ready for my close up."

Conventional wisdom is that the only people who care about the machinery behind popular entertainment are the people who make it, and there's some truth to that. But movies and TV shows are shared dreams, and for every person who doesn't want the illusion spoiled, there's another aching to see the man behind the curtain. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett's Sunset Blvd. revolves around the much parodied figure of silent-movie superstar Norma Desmond, played by real-life silent star Gloria Swanson. Forgotten by the industry that once worshipped at her box office returns, Norma lives in a suspended world of shadows and memories, cocooned
In a decaying Italianate mansion (once owned by oil billionaire J. Paul Getty and subsequently demolished to make way for a Getty office building) with her butler (Erich von Stroheim) — once both her director and her husband — and her dreams of a glorious comeback.

Narrated by a dead man — desperate b-movie screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden), whom we meet floating face-down in a swimming pool — and laced with bitter allusions to Hollywood's ruthless consumption of its young, Sunset Blvd. is blackly funny and quietly devastating: The business may be shallow and venal, but the power of movies to create worlds vivid, and satisfying than real life is what gets us hooked on them.

Things to consider:

Are today's stars like the stars of the past, or has that larger-than-life quality been eroded by scandal journalism the bad behavior of younger stars? Swanson, for example, was as wild in her day as Lindsay Lohan. But Swanson's indiscretions weren't not splashed all over the pages of tabloid magazines and newspapers.

Have the movies gotten small?

Goldie Hawn's Elise Elliot declares in The First Wives Club (1996) that there are three ages of women in Hollywood: "Babe, district attorney and Driving Miss Daisy." Norma Desmond is partly a victim of the sound era — many popular stars couldn't make the transition to talking pictures — and partly a victim of an industry in which women's roles grow scarcer as they get older.

Sunset Blvd. is shot through with Hollywood in jokes (and not funny ha-ha jokes, either); here are some:

Erich von Stroheim was one of the greatest directors of the silent era; he directed Swanson in the notorious and unfinished Queen Kelly — the movie Norma shows Joe in her private screening room.

Cecil B. DeMille, who plays himself, was one of the most popular directors and directed Swanson in several films. His scenes were done on the set of Samson and Delilah (1949), which was shot on the backlot at Paramount, the studio that made Swanson a star.

Hearst newspaper columnist Hedda Hopper, in her heyday the terror of Hollywood (she led the campaign against Orson Welles' Citizen Kane on behalf of her employer), plays herself.

The friends who gather at Norma's house to play cards, whom Joe Gillis unkindly dubs "the waxworks" are Anna Q. Nilsson, who made more than 150 films before 1928; H.B. Warner, whose silent career peaked with the role of Jesus Christ in DeMille's King of Kings; and comedian Buster Keaton.

Previous DVD blogs:

In Cold Blood
Brick

Also:

This Week's New DVD Releases

Question: I have two questions about Pirates of the Caribbean. First, Captain Sparrow and Miss Swann sing a song when they're stranded on the island, something about "yo-ho" and rum — what is it? And second, where did the term Davy Jones' locker come from? I know it refers to the bottom of the sea, but why?

FlickChick: The sea shanty Swann and Sparrow warble has a venerable history. The first lines are:

Fifteen men on the dead man's chest/
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!/
Drink and the devil had done for the rest/
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

They were penned by 19th-century writer Robert Louis Stevenson for his 1882 adventure novel Treasure Island, a motherload of popular pirate lore and imagery. Apparently Stevenson was inspired by a about legendary buccaneer Edward Teach (c.1680-1718), better known as Blackbeard, who is said to have marooned a ship full of mutinous sailors on a tiny island popularly referred to as "Dead Man's Chest" and returned to find that most of them had slaughtered each other. A writer named E.(wing) Young Allison expanded on Stevenson's evocative beginning in 1891, spinning it into a lengthy and gruesome poem called "The Derelict" (as in the derelict ship). It includes such grisly images as:

The mate was fixed by the bosun's pike/
The bosun brained with a marlinspike

and

The skipper lay with his nob in gore/
Where the scullion's axe his cheek had shore/
And the scullion he was stabbed times four.

Nasty. The poem was set to music in 1901 by composer Henry Waller and renamed "A Piratical Ballad" for a stage production of Treasure Island.

As to Davy Jones' locker, the short answer is: No one has the faintest idea. The concensus is that the earliest reference to Davy Jones is in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) by Tobias Smollett (coincidentally, like Stevenson, a Scot), which asserts that Jones is a sailors' bogeyman. Smollet describes Jones as having "saucer eyes... three rows of teeth... horns and tail" and breathing blue smoke. He presides over all the malevolent spirits of the deep and is often glimpsed before shipwrecks, crippling storms and other nautical nightmares. Jones keeps his treasures — everything that sinks beneath the waves — at the very bottom of the sea, so somehow the ocean floor came to be called his locker. Why not his chest or his storage room? Beats me and, apparently, everyone else as well.

But we do know that the phrase goes back at least two centuries, since the first clear reference comes from Tobias Smollett, who wrote in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle in 1751 that: "This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep, and is often seen in various shapes, perching among the rigging on the eve of hurricanes, ship-wrecks, and other disasters to which sea-faring life is exposed, warning the devoted wretch of death and woe." So his locker is the bottom of the sea, the ocean's depths.

I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, a nonfiction account of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, that read with the intensity of a novel, was published in 1966. It made Capote fabulously wealthy and internationally famous. It also destroyed him personally and professionally — he never wrote another book that came close to it, and he took to heavy drinking. Maybe he became too emotionally involved with killer Perry Smith, a frustrated artist and musician whose sad, strangled aspirations captured Capote's imagination. Or perhaps the years Capote invested in the project taught him how much it costs to invest your heart and soul in a book, and he could never bring himself to do it again.

In any event, nearly 40 years later, not one but two movies took it upon themselves to parse the relationship among Capote, his childhood friend and research assistant Harper Lee, who became the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To Kill a Mocking Bird, the killers and the people of Holcomb: Last year's Capote, which earned five top-tier Academy Award nominations and won Phillip Seymour Hoffman a best-picture Oscar for his performance as Capote, and Infamous, which opens on October 13th. After seeing both, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had to see In Cold Blood (1967).

How did I not get around to it sooner? I think I was 11 when I first heard of it. My parents enrolled my sisters and me in a summer program at St. David's School, which offered a variety of activities, from newsletter publishing to raising a chicken and then (after someone anonymous did the dirty deed of killing), boiling it to the bone and reassembling an elegantly bleached skeleton. I have no idea how I wound up in a drama class: Maybe I was grabbing at any alternative to the chicken project. But my teacher was a slender, dark-haired gamine named Brenda Currin, whose claim to fame was having played doomed teenager Nancy Clutter in a movie about some awful murders.

In Cold Blood (1967) is a dark gem, a true-crime movie that plays like a Greek tragedy. Two worlds, one stable, orderly, anchored by community ties and tradition, the other chaotic, disordered and rootless, collide, and six lives are ultimately forfeit, the Clutters — upright father, ailing mother, bright, ambitious teenaged son and daughter — terrorized and slaughtered in their home, and murderers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock methodically hanged by the state of Kansas in 1965. As Capote does in his book, director-screenwriter Richard Brooks portrays Hickock and Smith as men rather than monsters, without ever letting the monstrous thing they did recede into the background, or suggesting that the Clutters bore any responsibility for their fates.

Brooks (1912-1992) was a deeply serious filmmaker whose resume included the tough-minded newspaper picture Deadline -- U.S.A. (1952); controversial juvenile delinquent drama Blackboard Jungle (1955); a scathing adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' bitter chronicle of religious hucksterism, Elmer Gantry (1960), which won him a best screenplay Oscar; and the underrated Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). Columbia Pictures executives suggested casting Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, two of the biggest male movie stars of the time, as Smith and Hickock. But Brooks held out for the unknown Scott Wilson as Hickock, the more callous and less complicated of the restless disenfranchised drifters who killed the family during a botched home-invasion robbery. He turned to former child actor Robert Blake, whose career was in the doldrums after years of Little Rascals comedies and a popular, low-rent series of Westerns in which he played the underage, Native American sidekick of cowpoke Red Ryder, to play Smith. John Forsythe, later the voice of Charlie on TV's Charlie's Angels is Alvin Dewey, the local cop investigating the murder of his neighbors. Curiously, at least for anyone who's seen Capote or Infamous, Truman Capote — of diminutive stature, high-pitched voice and fey mannerisms — is entirely absent. The only hint of his intimate involvement in the case is some nondescript newspaper reporter who lurks vaguely around the periphery of the action.

Brooks, who called In Cold Action "a kind of Greek tragedy, American style," shot in real locations, including the Clutter's house and the courtroom where Hickock and Perry were tried. When a crowd gathers around the Holcomb police station to see Perry and Hickock, who had been arrested in Las Vegas, brought in, many of the extras were locals who had gathered to watch the real killers take that same walk just a few years earlier. Seven of the 12 jurors in the trial scene actually served on the jury that convicted Hickock and Perry. Quincy Jones' jangling, jazzy score underscores cinematographer Conrad Hall's widescreen black-and-white cinematography, which is simultaneously bright — no noir shadows or offbeat angles — and unremittingly bleak. Unlike some groundbreaking films of the '60s, In Cold Blood doesn't feel like a product of its time; it's timelessly compelling and as provocative now as it was in 1967.

Some things to consider:

Was shooting on the actual locations a gimmick or does the authenticity of a real place carry some weight?

How would casting McQueen and Newman rather than Wilson (who still works regularly but never became a star) and Blake (later the star of gritty '70s TV cop show Baretta and most recently in the news as a suspect in the murder of his wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley) as the killers have changed the story's tone?

Do true crime stories inevitably give short shrift to the victims — especially if they were fundamentally nice, decent people — because sociopaths are more colorful and, in purely practical terms, still alive to tell their side of the story?

In her controversial 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm (like Capote, a New Yorker writer), declared that "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." You see how this bears on Capote's relationship with Hickock and, particularly, Smith — what do you think?

Finally, for anyone who's seen In Cold Blood plus Capote and/or Infamous, compare performances:

Phillip Seymour Hoffman vs. Toby Jones as Capote.

Clifton Collins/Daniel Craig/Robert Blake as Perry Smith

Chris Cooper/Jeff Daniels/John Forsythe as Alvin Dewey

Mark Pellegrino/Lee Pace/Scott Wilson as Dick Hickock

Catherine Keener vs. Sandra Bullock as (Nelle) Harper Lee

Last Week's Pick: BRICK

This week's new DVD releases

Question: I remember a film that came out sometime in the '90s and was about a guy who mowed the lawns in this suburban area where everything seemed perfect, but really wasn't. He befriends the young daughter of one family and at the end he has to leave; she gives him things like her comb and tells him what to do with them if he gets in trouble. Can you please tell me the title? Cortez

FlickChick: It's Lawn Dogs (1998), with Sam Rockwell as a poor, none-too-bright young man who tends yards in snobby Camelot Gardens, a gated Louisiana community, and Mischa Barton as the 10-year-old who takes refuge from her parents' social climbing in fairy-tale flights of fancy; their friendship is, inevitably, misinterpreted by the community's adults. Curiously, it opened the same year as the similarly themed Digging to China, in which Kevin Bacon plays a mentally challenged man who befriends a young girl — Evan Rachel Wood — who takes refuge in fantasies of escape from Mac's Indian Village, the kitschy roadside motel she lives in with her alcoholic mother and slutty sister. Their friendship doesn't end well, either.

Question: After watching Capote, I read that Truman Capote was raised by his aunt, who is currently the "Fruitcake Lady" from The Tonight Show. Is that true? — John-Paul


FlickChick: This sounds like one of those weird urban legends, like the persistent rumors that old-time comedian Stan Laurel was Clint Eastwood's father or that Susan Lucci is the daughter of Phyllis Diller, neither of which is true. But elderly author Marie "Tiny" Rudisill, star of the "Ask the Fruitcake Lady" segments featured on The Tonight Show is the late Truman Capote's aunt. And since Infamous, the second movie about Capote and the writing of In Cold Blood in less than a year (the first being, of course, Capote), opens on October 13th, the question seems serendipitously timely.

Orphaned at the age of 5, Marie (whose maiden name was Faulk) was raised in Monroeville, Alabama, by her unmarried cousin, Jennie Faulk. Faulk, who also took in Marie's four siblings, Lillie Mae, Lucille, Mary Ida and Seaborn, lived with her brother, Bud, and sisters Sook and Callie, and owned a dry-goods store. Lillie Mae was four years older than Marie, and in 1924, when she was 17 and already married to a salesman named Arch Parsons, Lillie Mae had Truman. She began leaving baby Truman with her cousin (who, frankly, must have been some kind of saint) for extended periods shortly after he was born, and moved away after she and Arch got divorced in 1928. Lillie Mae, who desperately wanted to move in society circles, changed her name to the less cornpone-sounding Nina, remarried and moved to New York City. Truman went to live with his mother and her second husband, Joseph Capote (who adopted him), in 1933.

The feisty Rudisill, a 95-year-old widow who lives in Florida and is the last surviving member of Capote's extended family, first appeared on The Tonight Show in December 2000 to promote her book Fruitcake, Memories of Truman Capote & Sook. She instructed Jay Leno and fellow guest Mel Gibson in the fine art of fruitcake making and clicked with audiences; by 2002 "Ask the Fruitcake Lady," in which she doles out tart-tongued, no-nonsense advice, was a regular feature. Her other books include Sook's Cookbook: Memories and Traditional Receipts from the Deep South, Critter Cakes & Frog Tea: Tales and Treats from the Emerald River and Truman Capote: The Story of His Bizarre and Exotic Boyhood by an Aunt Who Helped Raise Him. She has a new book due out in November, called Ask the Fruitcake Lady: Everything You Would Already Know If You Had Any Sense.

I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.

It's a teen movie. No, it's a neo-noir thriller. Teen movie! Neo-noir thriller! Wait… Brick is both: It's a dark crime thriller set in a nondescript suburban high school where the teens talk like '40s tough guys and hard-boiled dames. Could have been an affected disaster, but it's marvelously entertaining, intriguingly off-kilter and occasionally very funny

Mercilessly intelligent loner Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, of TV's Third Rock from the Sun) gets a bizarre phone call from his ex-girlfriend, Emily, who left him for a high-strung, drug-addled loser. First she says she's in trouble and needs help, then she says she doesn't, then she turns up dead in a culvert. With little to go on other than Emily's cryptic reference to "the pin," Brendan launches an investigation that cuts across his school's rigidly stratified cliques, from stoners to mean girls, delinquents, theater divas, jocks and brains. All roads eventually lead to The Pin (Lukas Haas of Witness), a shadowy crime lord barely out of his own teens and operating from his mom's finished basement.

Hearing terse vintage slang delivered at machine-gun speed by dewy SoCal teens is really odd for about 10 minutes, but then you're over the disjunction between what you're hearing and what you're seeing. That's when you start to realize how clever first-time writer-director Rian Johnson's screenplay is, and to appreciate the way the stylized dialogue lends the characters an unexpected depth and weight. The poignant edge comes from the film's pitch-perfect evocation of the way brainy, introspective teenagers mentally recast their dreary day-to-day miseries as thrilling, sexy, dangerous pulp fictions.

Things to talk about:

1) What makes a movie noir or neo-noir? Is it the story type (crime), the theme (urban alienation, cruel destiny, ordinary people sucked into whirlpools of crime and violence), the style (heavy shadows, strange camera angles), the character types (femme fatale, world-weary detective, perverse criminals), the atmosphere (cynicism, learned helplessness, pessimism) or some combination of these?

2) Parents are often largely unseen in high-school pictures. How does Brick conform to that convention and how does it tweak it, notably in the scene with Pin's mom?

3) How does Johnson explore the idea of identity labels (nerd, goth, computer geek) that are imposed from the outside, as opposed to internally driven role-playing modeled on movie (or other pop-culture) archetypes?

4) Why cast Richard Roundtree as Brendan's nemesis, the tough-as-Shaft vice principal?

Child actors such as Lukas Haas and Joseph Gordon-Levitt can't always make the transition to adult roles — why? (Some examples to consider would be Haley Joel Osment, Macaulay Culkin, Christina Ricci, Leonardo DiCaprio, Edward Furlong, Anna Paquin and Neil Patrick Harris.)