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A Beautiful Fraud

by Ken Fox
Read Set a Date for Violent Saturday!
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Original one-sheet poster from Richard Fleischer's Violent Saturday courtesy Film Forum/Photofest.
Contrary to popular cliches, a film noir doesn't have to be in set on the mean, rain-slicked backstreets of a cramped, malevolent city, nor does it even have to be in black-and-white ("noir" is really a world-view than a palette). And although purists may argue otherwise, a movie need not have been produced during the tumultuous years of WWII and its immediate aftermath to be considered a true "noir." Case in point: Richard Fleischer's Violent Saturday, a brightly colored, black-hearted look at crime and the American character from 1955 that's just now being re-released in a sparkling new 35mm print. This rarely seen pulp masterpiece was not only shot in blazing DeLuxe Color and ultra-wide CinemaScope, it's set in a seemingly idyllic desert mining town, and most of it unfolds in bright, broad daylight -- the better to see the corruption festering just below the happy surface. Noir? You bet.

The Yale-educated Fleischer -- son of the maverick animator Max Fleischer -- kept busy right through 1989, making stuff like Conan the Destroyer and Red Sonja (he died in 2006), but back in the '40s and '50s he made as string of B-noirs that rank among the best of the genre. The most well-known is probably the drum-tight Narrow Margin, but Fleischer also gave us the underseen Armored Car Robbery and the excellent Rogue Cop, about rampaging policeman (Robert Taylor) who makes Bad Lieutenant look like Officer Friendly. (Fleischer also made a number of good, moody crime films durning the '60s and '70s, like true-crime classics The Boston Strangler and 10 Rillington Place, and the solid Elmore Leonard adaptation Mr. Majestyk, starring Charles Bronson.) Violent Saturday, however, just might be Fleischer's best noir; it's certainly his most expansive. Adapted by Sydney Boehm (The Big Heat, Shock Treatment) from William L. Heath's dime-store classic, the film is ostensibly about a bank heist the small but bustling Arizona mining town of Bradenville, where copper is king. Three "salesmen" -- ringleader Stephen McNally, bespectacled cold fish J. Carrol Naish and an unforgettable Lee Marvin, playing a tweaking, benzedrine-sniffing hood with a bad nose-spray habit and a grudge against the world -- check into the Bradenville Hotel then case the bank, which they plan to rob just before noon on the following day -- a Saturday, natch.

But the real action is in the town itself. The town's copper scion (Richard Egan) is a sloppy, unhappily married drunk; his wife (Margaret Hayes) is the country-club slut who's sleeping with an oily Don Juan (He: "Why do you play golf?" She: "I look good in sweaters"); the prim librarian (played by the wonderful Sylvia Sydney) is a thief and a blackmailer, and the town's milquetoast bank manager (Tommy Noonan) is a sweaty, drooling peeping tom. Even the ostensible hero (Victor Mature), the mine superintendent, is crippled by a sense of his own inadequate masculinity: He served on the home front instead of the beaches of Iwo Jima, and his disillusioned young son knows it. Twin Peaks has nothing on this town. Did I mention Ernest Borgnine as a pitchfork-weilding Amish farmer? Tough stuff, indeed, and in true noir fashion, that happy ending is anything but.

If you're lucky enough to be in New York City over the next week, do yourself a favor and head down to Film Forum, where Violent Saturday will be playing through March 6. Otherwise, keep an eye peeled and say prayer for an upcoming DVD release.

BTW, I'm always on the lookout for a good noir. What are your favorites?
Read End of the Line for New Line?
It looks like the end of an era for New Line Cinema, once the little independent studio that could. As reported today by the Los Angeles Times, the 41-year-old, New York-based movie-industry upstart will be downsized and absorbed into parent company Time Warner's other major media outlet, Warner Bros.

Founded in 1967 by Bob Shaye and his lawyer Michael Lynne — New Line's current co-chairmen and co-CEOs — the company was bought by the Turner Broadcasting System in 1994, which merged with Time Warner two years later. The consolidation of New Line into Warner Bros. is widely seen as a cost-cutting move aimed at boosting Time Warner's lagging stock price.

From a little acorn, a mighty oak did grow. New Line began as an independent distributor, unleashing John Waters' notorious Pink Flamingos on an unsuspecting public while bringing the 1936 anti-drug cult classic Reefer Madness to a whole new audience: stoned college kids and habitués of the midnight theater circuit. Under Shaye and Lynn's stewardship, the studio would go on to produce and distribute such phenomenally successful franchises as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Austin Powers, Rush Hour and the Academy Award-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy. The studio's latest release, the Will Ferrell basketball spoof Semi-Pro, opens tomorrow.

According to the Times, Shaye and Lynne will be leaving the company despite their reported attempts to remain onboard, but the company may not disappear completely. In a statement released today, Time Warner's recently appointed chief executive Jeff Bewkes hinted that New Line may continue on as a separate unit within Warner Bros., focusing on the kind of genre fare that made the company its fortune in the first place.
Read Be Kind Rewind Scandal?
A mob of angry customers storm the counter of their local video store, complaining that the VHS cassettes they've rented aren't the actual movies but cheap homemade reenactments. The plot of the new Jack Black comedy Be Kind Rewind? Not quite: This funny premise was actually the basis for a sketch on the popular Nickelodeon comedy series The Amanda Show, starring Amanda Bynes. Eight years ago.

The skit, which recently surfaced on YouTube, features Bynes and costar Drake Bell as a pair of clerks in a "Blockblister" video store who've replaced tapes of Austin Powers, The Wizard of Oz, Titanic and others with their own crappy, basement quality versions — just what Black and his costar, Mos Def, do in Be Kind Rewind, which was written and directed by video-wunderkind-turned-feature-director Michel Gondry (The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Each time a customer complains, Amanda and Drake's boss argues in a comically heavy accent, "This movie better!" before the kids chime in with "Much better!" (and in this case, it's true: the skit is much better — and shorter — than Gondry's movie).



Michel, looks like you've got some 'splaining to do. Or does he? The irony here is that Gondry's film imagines a world — Passaic, New Jersey, actually — momentarily freed from the constraints of copyright laws and intellectual property protections, where the plots and dialogue from popular studio movies are free for the taking. And that's seen as a good thing. Is he right? Are certain ideas public property? Or should somebody somewhere be writing The Amanda Show a big fat check?
Read Depp, Law and Farrell to Replace Heath Ledger?
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Johnny Depp by Eamonn McCormack/ WireImage.com, Heath Ledger by J. Vespa/ WireImage.com
From Bela Lugosi’s heart attack during Plan 9 from Outer Space and Natalie Wood’s drowning midway through Brainstorm to Brandon Lee’s fatal shooting on the set of The Crow, a number of productions have had to work around the unexpected death of a leading actor. Now it seems Terry Gilliam, the director of Heath Ledger’s last project, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, may have found a most creative way around his own tragic dilemma. According to Ain’t It Cool News, Ledger’s role in the film will now be played by not one but three alternating replacements: Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law.

Not much is known about the plot of the film, but Ledger’s character has been described as a man in love with a young woman whose soul has been sold to the devil by her father, the traveling showman of the title, in exchange for eternal youth. No word yet on how the rather extreme differences in the four actors’ looks will be explained.

If any one could pull this off, it’s the imaginative and daring Gilliam, who also directed Ledger in 2005's The Brothers Grimm, but it sounds to me like a risky gambit. This could be either a touching tribute from a director and trio of fellow actors, or a confusing disaster. What do you think?
Read Paris Hilton's Hottie Is Definitely a Nottie
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The Hottie and the Nottie courtesy Regent Releasing
Not that we needed anyone but our own Maitland McDonagh to tell us exactly how bad The Hottie and the Nottie -- cultural time- and attention-waster Paris Hilton's latest attempt to star in something that isn't shot in night-vision -- turned out to be (the divine Ms. M's excoriating exegesis is currently topping the "The Bad Review Revue" list over at the hilarious DefectiveYeti.com). It seems IMDb users have also weighed in with their own carefully considered opinions. According to the folks over at SlashFilm.com, Hottie has unseated the 2004 horror-indie Zombie Nation as the absolutely worst rated movie ever on a site that tracks roughly a bazillion titles. How low is the rating? It's #1 in the bottom 100. Out of ten stars, it's currently sporting a 1.5. That's bad, people. To make matters even worse, BoxOfficeMojo.com is reporting Hottie grossed an embarrassing $27,696 on 111 screens during its opening -- and presumably biggest -- weekend (that breaks down to about $249.51 per screen, give or take a penny or two, and believe me, someone somewhere is counting every one). So it seems most people had no interest in seeing Paris at work, and those few who did hated -- hated -- what they saw.

Is there any hope for Paris? Can anything be said in her defense?
Read Heath Ledger: A Career Cut Short
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Heath Ledger in Candy courtesy THINKFilm
Not long before 3:35 pm on January 22, 2008, the short life and promising career of actor Heath Ledger came to a sudden, tragic end. It was around this time that Ledger's housekeeper and his masseuse discovered the body of the Australian-born actor in the bedroom of the Broome Street apartment he'd been renting in lower Manhattan. Ledger was not yet 29 years old.

News of Ledger's death came as a terrible shock to nearly everyone, even though it now seems the low-key, Oscar-nominated actor had been privately battling his own demons for quite some time. His passing is the terrible surprise ending no one saw coming, an abrupt finale to a life and career that seemed to be all about the unexpected.

Born and raised in Perth, Australia, and named after the darkly romantic anti-hero from Wuthering Heights (he has a sister named Katherine), Ledger left school at the age of 17 to pursue a career in acting. He eventually landed a role in Blackrock, a small independent feature about teen rape, followed by short stints on the Australian TV series Sweat and Home and Away. After starring opposite Vera Farmiga in Roar, Shaun Cassidy's short-lived Celtic sword-and-sorcery adventure series for Fox, Ledger got his first major Hollywood break: playing bad-boy Patrick Verona in 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), a popular teen updating of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. The role garnered Ledger some attention and a fan base, but he was obviously miscast and uncomfortable with high-school hijinks. Though barely 20, it was already clear that Ledger, with his unconventional looks and a naturally brooding, introspective demeanor, would never fit into the typical heartthrob mold, and he would prove difficult to cast effectively.

Despite good reviews for his performance as the idealistic and doomed Continental soldier Gabriel in Mel Gibson's The Patriot (2000) and a charismatic turn in the unexpectedly fun and entirely forgettable A Knight's Tale (2001), the serious starring role he needed continued to elude him. Ledger found himself fumbling through a series of misfires: The Four Feathers, Ned Kelly, The Order. Small but memorable parts in movies like the acclaimed Monster's Ball and the otherwise negligible Lords of Dogtown, as well as his tag-team turn with Matt Damon in The Brothers Grimm, suggested that perhaps Ledger wasn't cut out to be a leading man.

And then came the big surprise, the kind of revelatory moment of which Hollywood legends — and careers — are made: Ledger's heartbreaking performance as Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005). It was a role a number of actors, shy about playing gay, had already passed on, but Ledger pounced, giving himself up heart and soul to the role of a repressed Wyoming ranch hand whose inability to openly admit his love for another man (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) consigns him to a life of isolation, anguish and loneliness. Ledger's astonishing, beautifully nuanced performance earned him perfectly apt comparisons to the likes of Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and Sean Penn, as well as an Academy Award nomination (he would lose to Capote's Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Ledger's disappointing follow-up — the title role in Casanova (also 2005), Lasse Hallström's fanciful bio of the legendary lover — served as a reminder that Ledger still wasn't right for everything, but his next three films would position him as one of the most interesting — and unpredictable — actors of his generation. In the underrated Candy (2006), Ledger turned in a richly textured — and unsettlingly convincing — portrayal of an Australian junkie whose love for heroin ruins both his life and the life of his lover, played by Abbie Cornish. In Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, he played a self-destructive, James Dean-esque actor whose marriage falls apart under the twin pressures of stardom and adultery. And of course, there's The Dark Knight, due for release on July 18, in which Ledger will appear as the homicidal psychopath the Joker, a role he admitted in a recent New York Times Magazine interview he found tough to shake.

Several days before his death, Ledger was reportedly in London working on Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, a dark fantasy about a traveling theater. In what may turn out to be the final image of the actor taken before his death, Ledger poignantly appears on set dressed as Pierrot, the brokenhearted clown mesmerized by the moon and in love with a woman he can never have.

Poll: Which of Ledger's films is your personal favorite?

Related:
News: Heath Ledger Was in "Good Spirits" on Final Film Shoot
News: Heath Ledger Found Dead; Family Calls It "Tragic, Untimely"
Jeers: Larry King flubs Heath Ledger profile
Watch video: News coverage of Ledger's shocking death
Watch video: Clips from many of Ledger's films
Photo gallery: Heath Ledger's life in pictures
Photo gallery: Stars and friends tribute Ledger
Read Indiana Jones Sneak Peek!
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Ray Winstone, Shia LaBeouf, and Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull by David James/© Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All rights reserved.
For Indiana Jones fans who can't wait another second for the smallest scrap of news about 2008's most eagerly awaited flick, you're in luck. The folks over at Lucas Films are graciously whettting our collective appetite for their top-secret sequel Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with this production still featuring Shia LaBeouf, who reportedly plays Indy's son, alongside a decidedly older, and a bit more grizzled, fortune-hunting Harrison Ford. The dude in the background is none other than Ray Winstone, looking at lot more like his real-life portly self than the hunky, nearly naked motion-capture avatar he played in the computer animated Beowulf. Need more? You'll have to wait: Paramount isn't planning on releasing what promises to be the summer's biggest blockbuster until May 22, 2008, just in time to break a few Memorial Day records.

Frankly, it all looks an awful lot like the previous three installments of the franchise; if LaBeouf were a small Vietnamese boy, this could be a shot from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

What's your take? Does this photo make you hot?
Read Jessica Simpson's Blonde Ambition Could Set Record
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Jessica Simpson on location for "Blonde Ambition" by Kevin Mazur/WireImage.com
It seems Jessica Simpson's new movie, Blonde Ambition, may have set some sort of record. With an opening day gross of $384, it may be one of the lowest grossing theatrical films ever. In what sounds like a shamelessly uncredited remake of Mike Nichols' Academy Award-winning comedy Working Girl, Simpson stars as a sweet, small-town gal from Oklahoma who climbs the corporate ladder at a construction firm in big, bad New York City. My guess is that a credited Luke Wilson stars as the Harrison Ford character. Now in all fairness, Blonde Ambition, which was produced by father Joe Simpson's ickily named Papa Joe Productions, was only released into eight theaters, all in Simpson's and Wilson's home state of Texas. To put this in perspective, I Am Legend opened across the country on over 3600 screens, and Blonde Ambition, which is scheduled to come out on DVD on January 22 anyway, arrived with none of the ad muscle accompanying its holiday season competition, like this week's box-office champ, National Treasure: Book of Secrets ($45.5 million so far). But when you break it down, it turns out only 48 people paid to see Blonde Ambition on its opening day, which means only six people per theater. (Although according to a posting on Cinematical.com, three of those screens were in Cinemark Discount Theaters, which offered $2 tickets after 6 pm, so that number could be marginally higher.) Doesn't someone like Jessica Simpson have more than 48 friends? What about that big Texas family of hers? And I understand Owen Wilson maybe too fragile to sit through a Jessica Simpson comedy without at least one drink beforehand, but what about the rest of the Wilson clan? And doesn't co-star Andy Dick have fans? Just how bad is this thing anyway?

PS: It should be noted that thanks to a DVD screener leak, Blonde Ambition has been available online for weeks, and so far over 6000 fans — or people who just like getting something for nothing — have downloaded it. So has Blonde Ambition fallen victim to digital piracy, or the unbreakable curse of Jessica Simpson?
Read ABBA’s Mamma Mia! Trailer Unleashed!
How can I resist you? Hot on the heels of Hairspray, Mamma Mia! -- the hugely popular NYC tourist must-see based on the naggingly memorable ABBA songbook -- is also making the transition from Broadway stage to screen, with original stage director Phyllida Law behind the camera and a pretty stellar cast out front. Amanda Seyfried (Veronica Mars, Big Love) plays Sophie, the young bride-to-be determined to solve the mystery of her birth dad's identity on the eve of her Greek Isle wedding. Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard and Pierce Brosnan are the three likeliest suspects; Meryl Streep stars as her mom. Universal will be releasing Mamma Mia! in Summer 2008, but the trailer is starting to make the rounds. Will it be the summer’s biggest guilty pleasure? Probably, but who am I to get snarky about ABBA? “Waterloo” was the very first record I ever bought. It cost 98 cents, which makes me kind of pathetic and old.

Read The Dark Knight: The Joker Revealed!
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Heath Ledger as the Joker on the January 2008 cover of Empire Magazine
Aside from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Sandman Mystery Theatre and Rex Mundi, I’m really not a very big comic-book fan. But I’ve got to admit I can’t wait for The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan’s sequel to the supremely excellent Batman Begins that’s scheduled to hit theaters in July 2008. The reason: The advent of the Joker, one of the greatest pop-culture villains since Richard III. I’m one of the few people who doesn’t really like Tim Burton’s Batman, mainly because I’ve always hated Jack Nicholson’s buffoonish turn (let the flaming begin). The Joker should inspire giddy fear, not goofy laughs (check out Allan Moore’s classic Joker story arc in The Killing Joke for what I think is the best – and scariest – take on this endlessly fascinating character). So I was thrilled to learn that Heath Ledger had been cast in the role, since he’s a good actor who, I suspect, has a dark side worth exploring. And like all things related to the Batman franchise, from the Batmobile to the Batsuit, the Joker’s costume and makeup has been kept top-secret. Until now.

For the past week, the British movie magazine Empire has been running a clever Dark Knight tie-in on their website. Each day, one of nine playing cards arranged on a grid has been flipped over to reveal a section of a large, unidentified photo under the mysterious caption “All will be revealed.... ” The card covering the face would be, presumably, the last flipped. Once the purple pants and green vest came into view, a lot of fans guessed correctly that the final image would be the first official glimpse of Ledger in full Joker regalia. Well today, a little bit ahead of the scheduled big reveal, the psycho’s out of the bag and the full photo — which will appear as the cover of Empire’s January 2008 issue — is now on view. For my money, that is one scary-looking Joker, a true homicidal nutcase straight out of Arkham Asylum instead of a Cesar Romero impersonator or a reject from an Insane Clown Posse tribute band. Whaddya think?
Read Zac Efron: The New David Cassidy?
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Cover photos: Zac Efron by Matthew Rolston for Rolling Stone; David Cassidy by Annie Leibovitz for Rolling Stone
It's really really hard for me to even fake the slightest bit of interest in High School Musical 2 and its unprecedented success. As TV Guide Channel's Nikki Boyer put it so succinctly the other night on Watch This!, if the record-breaking numbers prove anything, it's simply that kids love crap. But like a lot of people, I was struck by the recent cover of Rolling Stone and the magazine's positioning of HSM2's squeaky-clean "hunk" Zac Efron as "America's Latest Heart Throb." I realize a lot has changed over the years, and Rolling Stone is hardly the countercultural force it was in the early '70s, but the Efron cover — and the toothless interview within — immediately brought to my mind the staggeringly popular teen idol David Cassidy's appearance on the cover of the same magazine back in 1972.

Already a huge star thanks to the runaway success of The Partridge Family — and the grueling, nonstop touring schedule he endured over his weekends away from the set — Cassidy had begun to realize teenybopper stardom can quickly become a trap. Fave rave Cassidy hoped to use an interview in Rolling Stone as a means to transform his image into something more mature, and give his own clean teen-dream image a little bit of edge. The attempt backfired, and the cover photo became notorious. Shot by a young Annie Leibovitz, the portrait shows an obviously naked Cassidy sprawled on his back on a patch of grass, arms thrown over his head, eyes blissfully shut and a sly smile offering a small hint of what might be happening just outside of the frame, which cuts off right above the pubic line (the inside spread would provocatively drop that cut-off point about an inch). The headline was Beat and brilliant: "The Naked Lunchbox: The Business of David Cassidy." (You can listen to Leibovitz discussing the cover here.)

Robin Green's interview inside came as an even bigger shock. Revealing even more skin — and pubic hair — and making comments about the "sticky seats" left behind by his female fans, Cassidy let loose his deep anger over being so ruthlessly exploited without fair financial recompense (welcome to the jungle, David), and went so far as to make disparaging remarks about the Partridge Family's music. The effort was a serious miscalculation. However justified, Cassidy's griping sounded like the grumblings of an ungrateful 21-year-old hand-biter, and his sexy provocations only alienated his core teenybopper audience, many of whom probably had no idea that grown men even had hair, you know, down there. Worse, the image-changing strategy didn't work. It turned out that alienated core audience was Cassidy's only audience.

But what a difference three-and-a-half decades and one post-sexual revolution evolution can make. Pretty young men are now free to be displayed like pretty young women, but without the lewd catcalls someone like, say, a barely legal Britney Spears endured in 1999 after she posed for her own sexy RS cover in a black bra and polka-dot panties, a phone in hand and a Tinky-Wink babyishly clutched in the other (cue The Knack's "Good Girls Don't"). Rolling Stone has also evolved, becoming the kind of magazine that would cynically bank on attracting a certain young demographic with the same imagery it once used to repel it.

In a camera-phone-ready age when a vast segment of Internet users knows exactly what Britney's vagina and Pete Wentz's penis look like, posing like a twink porn star on the cover of Rolling Stone is a way of establishing your image, not challenging it. Sex can no longer be used to threaten (unless of course, it's same-sex sex), not when it's expected, even demanded. And while Neil Strauss' profile within the Efron issue allows Zac to sound downright Cassidy-esque about the appeal of the HSM songbook ("If I had to hear the High School Musical songs anymore," he tells Strauss, "I probably would have jumped off something very tall."), he knows exactly on which side his slice is buttered. "As long as I stay boring, I think I'll be fine," he opines, right next to a half-page nipple-baring photo. No worries there, Zac, no worries at all.
Read Hey Avril, the Rubinoos Called. They Want Their Song Back
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Avril Lavigne by Theo Wargo/WireImage.com
I know I’m too old to be paying attention to what Avril Lavigne is doing these days (or any day, for that matter), but I’m also old enough to remember a great powerpop band from the 1970s who called themselves the Rubinoos, and the fact of the matter is this: Avril Lavigne’s latest single, “Girlfriend,” is a total rip-off of the Rubinoos’ classic 1979 single, “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend.”

The only reason I know this is that I saw the Canadian part-time-punk princess — who got her first taste of stardom when she won some kind of contest and got to appear on stage with Shania Twain (how punk rock is that?) — on David Letterman. I tuned in right as Avril hit the chorus and I immediately thought, “Aw, jeez. She’s ruining that great Rubinoos song. Is nothing sacred?” Then I realized that it wasn’t a cover at all, but an incredible simulation that someone was trying to pass off as their own work.

If you were here with me, I would sing it for you (not that it would help — I’m totally tone deaf), but trust me: the chorus — melody and lyrics — bears a potentially litigious similarity to that powerpop nugget:

“Hey, hey, you, you, I don’t like your girlfriend” — Avril

“Hey, hey, you, you, I wanna be your boyfriend” — Rubinoos

The middle section goes on to lift the bridge from Toni Basil’s “Mickey,” or rather “Mickey” by way of Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl.” Have you no shame, Avril?

But seriously, an artist like Avril Lavigne really can’t be held all that accountable for her art, so who’s the culprit? According to the credits, that would be none other than Lukasz Gottwald, aka Luke Gottwald, aka Dr. Luke, the songwriting machine who's written massive hits for the likes of Kelly Clarkson (“Behind These Hazel Eyes” and “Since U Been Gone,” which I kinda sorta like). Surely Dr. Luke has enough in the bank to pony up a few bucks and cut the Rubinoos a nice check, dontcha think? Or at least get himself a lawyer.
Read That Song... That Movie!
I finally got to see David Fincher’s Zodiac, and as much as I loved it, what really stuck with me was Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” The song is only heard twice in the nearly three-hour movie, but it's stayed in my head ever since. I was talking to Maitland about it and she remembered Quentin Tarantino talking about how Scorsese’s Mean Streets “owned” the Ronettes song “Be My Baby.” Although he knew the song before seeing the film, Tarantino said he'll never again hear it without thinking of the scene in which it's heard. That’s a perfect description for what happened at Zodiac. To me, “Hurdy Gurdy Man” was always just a strange psych-folk song that the Butthole Surfers eventually covered, but it’ll now forever be "owned" by Fincher’s Zodiac. I’ll never be able to hear Jimmy Page's squalling guitar solo without seeing the Zodiac opening fire on those kids in the car, or hear Donovan’s breathy moan that opens the song without reliving the film’s chilling final moment in the Toronto airport.

So I got to thinking: What other movies “own” certain songs? I don't mean an original song that was first heard in a popular movie that then became famous — songs like “My Heart Will Groan On” from Titanic or “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany's — but movies that took a song that was already pretty well-known and made such great use of it that whatever memories we may had previously associated with the song were wiped out. Now whenever we hear that song, we think of that scene before anything else. Here’re a few songs/scenes I've been throwing around in my head:

1. Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet.
2. Kitty Lester’s “Love Letters” also used to great effect in Blue Velvet
3. Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” in Michael Mann’s Manhunter (thanks, Maitland!)
4. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird” in The Devil’s Rejects
5. Stealers Wheels’ “Stuck in the Middle with You” in Reservoir Dogs
6. Derek and the Domino’s “Layla” in Goodfellas
7. Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” in Almost Famous (thanks, Cathy!)
8. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You” from Stranger than Paradise
9. The Plimsouls' “A Million Miles Away” in Valley Girl
10. Modern English’s “I’ll Melt with You” in Valley Girl (OK, so I love Valley Girl)
11. Tom Petty’s “American Girl” in Silence of the Lambs
12. Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” in Pulp Fiction

I’m sure there are tons more out there, so I figured I’d put the question to the real experts. Can you think of any other songs that are now, in your minds at least, irrevocably linked to a particular scene in a particular movie?
Read Fantomas Lives!
It’s only the beginning of March and I’ve already broken my one and only New Year’s resolution. I swore to myself that in 2007 I wouldn’t get all caught up in the kind of collecting obsession that led me to start buying vintage Ouija boards (I collected over 50 before I finally stopped), but I’ve already found a fresh addiction: Fantomas! It’s the name of the fictional French super-villain created by the journalist Pierre Souvestre and his secretary turned writing partner Marcel Allain in 1911, and whose dastardly exploits were chronicled in the hugely popular series of novels the pair published at a rate of one per month for the next two and a half years. Like Fu Manchu and Professor Moriarty before him, Fantomas is a “genius of crime,” a villain so terrifying that few in Paris dare believe this shadowy master of disguise, this murderer par excellence, is even real. Only police inspector Juve, Fantomas’ obsessed pursuer, and Jerome Fandor, Juve’s journalist sidekick, are certain of his existence, but like a modern FBI profiler who risks his own sanity to capture the insane killer, Juve’s state of mind often appears slightly unbalanced. Very often the readers themselves have no idea who among the cast of characters might actually be Fantomas – not until some terrible crime diabolical enough to make the Joker green with envy is committed, and one suddenly realizes that that kindly old doctor, say, isn’t a doctor at all but a demented serial killer. After cranking out a total of 32 Fantomas adventures, Souvestre died suddenly in early 1914, not long after Fantomas himself was supposedly killed off (the final book in the original series is titled La Fin de Fantomas). But like Freddie Krueger, there’s no keeping a good villain down: The spectral shape-shifter was resurrected by Allain in the mid-1920s, right around the time Allain tied the knot with Souvestre’s former girlfriend (très français, n’est-ce pas?), and went on to terrorize Paris for 11 more installments.

Souvestre and Allain's characters had clear antecedents in the fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle and the perennially popular “Nick Carter” detective stories, but something about the figure of Fantomas captured the imagination of a wide cross-section of the French reading public like few pulp characters before him. (His seemingly indestructible nature, his extreme and often unmotivated violence, and the depiction of the Parisian underworld through which he moved made Fantomas a particular favorite among the emerging Surrealist movement.) But his enormous popularity wasn’t due entirely to the books themselves. Within months of Fantomas’ literary debut, the great early French filmmaker Louis Feuillade premiered his adaptation of the early novels — he made five Fantomas serials in all — and while perhaps not as great as Feuillade’s later Les Vampires and Judex, Fantomas is still considered the first great crime serial. (It’s currently unavailable in the U.S., but if you own a multiregion DVD player you can — you must — order Fantomas off eBay or Amazon.co.uk. Les Vampires and Judex, on the other hand, are both readily available as domestic DVD releases and are more fun than you can possibly imagine.) Film and television adaptations of the exploits of Juve and his elusive nemesis would continue well into the 1980s.

My problem is that only eight or so books in the original series were ever translated into English, and my French is piss-poor to say the least (despite taking years of French, I still can’t make my way through Le Petit Prince). And while Penguin Books has been gracious enough to reprint the first Fantomas novel (entitled simply Fantomas), complete with an introduction by the poet John Ashbery and a cover featuring the famous poster art for the Feuillade serial, it’s a little like giving someone a taste of a fabulous new and highly addictive drug, then criminalizing it. What few editions of the English translations are still circulating now fetch quite a pretty penny on eBay, and Penguin doesn’t seem interested in doing others (The Daughter of Fantomas, however, has been recently been translated and published by the good folks at Black Coat Press; perhaps they’ll do more.) Hence my predicament, my current obsession and my rapidly shrinking bank account. So take my advice: By all means read the Penguin reprint, but be warned: You may end up as I did, broken... penniless... another victim of the Lord of Terror known simply as... Fantomas!
Read And the Number 1 Best Song-Worst Ad Goes To...
Thanks for all the great input into the whole "great songs, bad ads" subject, and a special thank you to Mares for pointing out that what we’re hearing in the AARP ad isn’t actually the Buzzcocks’ original recording of “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays,” but a more recent cover version by Ash, a band I now remember really liking at some point (if memory serves, “Girl from Mars” is a stone-cold classic single). After reading through the comments I now have two confessions to make. First, re raputathebuta’s post, I must admit that I always secretly thought the Volkswagen ad featuring Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" that was really quite lovely, even though using the song to sell cars probably caused St. Nick to spin in his grave. But hey, if it took an ad to turn people on to such a criminally neglected artist as Nick Drake (and the ad did boost sales of his albums higher than they ever were during his all-too-brief lifetime), well then I guess I can live with that.

Secondly, I must also confess that after first seeing the same “So easy a caveman can do it” Geico ad the_hobbet, SassyMurasaki and Raven mention – the one in the airport -- I did immediately Google the lyrics, find the song title and artist’s name, and then download both the “radio edit” and the “radio remix” of Royksopp’s “Remind Me” from iTunes. Cheesy, I know, but it’s a great song and I’m not sorry I did it. (Future blog topic: recent, seriously guilty but pleasurable iTunes downloads. Laura Branigan’s name will be mentioned.)

And speaking of cheesy, Angel Cohn and I just saw what’s got to be the most grievous misuse of a song in an ad yet, and the best example I could imagine of how a viewer’s prior knowledge of a song’s lyrics can completely undercut the intent of the commercial. Anyone recognize the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun” in the new Wendy’s spot for that mozzarella sandwich? They don’t actually play much – just that unmistakable opening guitar riff and that ear-catching little snare hiccup – but they don't have to. It’s instantly recognizable and anyone familiar with the song will immediately flash forward to “I’m high as a kite,” “I stain my sheets,” and “I’m so strung out.” Now even if Wendy’s is in fact trying to turn on its junkie consumer base to the sugary benefits of the Frosty, there’s no excusing the chorus. Humming “Let me go on, like a blister in the sun…” to yourself while watching white cheese bubble and ooze over a slab of hot meat enough to make you lose your lunch and swear-off Wendy’s forever. Didn’t they have enough trouble already with the whole finger-in-the-chili debacle? What could they possibly be thinking?
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