I’m going straight for your attention-jugular with these words: Blancanieves (2012) is an adaptation of Snow White, except it’s about bullfighters. And yes, there are dwarves.

It also happens to be a fantastic movie.

Blancanieves is a Spanish, silent, black-and-white ode to the films of the late silent era. I’m pretty sure it is constructed entirely of magic and beauty. Eight years in the making, the film was finally released in 2012 in Spain, and is finally wandering its way over to the United States. (In fact, it’s playing in some art house theaters right now. And yes, you should go see it.)

The film is set in 1920s Seville, opening upon a bullfighting match where a love-distracted toreador is gored by a rampaging bull. As his life is saved in a hospital, his pregnant wife dies during childbirth, leaving the crippled father with an infant daughter. The father eventually marries his domineering nurse, who then locks the wheelchair-bound man in a room and turns the daughter into a servant while she cavorts with the toreador’s money. The tale follows the daughter as she grows up under the tyrannical rule of her stepmother. And yes, there are eventually dwarves.

The tale is told with love, humor, and charm by director Pablo Berger, who also wrote and produced the film. Every image feels iconic. I am immensely pleased that I got to see it in a huge theater that was packed with people, because this is the sort of film that brings an audience under rapt attention. Gasps and laughs abounded. The film was spellbinding. It’s pure movie magic.

If you can’t tell already, I love this movie. If I had a Blu-Ray of the film, I would have already shown the film to at least three people this week. This a film that embodies pretty much all of my sensibilities of what makes a truly great movie.

Keep an eye out for this one.

P.S. – director Pablo Berger is adorable in person. If you ever get the chance to see him do a Q&A, do it.

Director Pablo Berger (center) at Ebertfest 2013, explaining the symbolism of a falling hat from the opening scene of Blancanieves. (If a hat falls brim-down, it is good luck. If it falls brim-up, it is bad luck.)

Escape from Tomorrow is a film I literally thought I’d never get to see. Shot entirely at Disney theme parks without permission, this black-and-white fantasy-horror-comedy might never reach distribution before being squashed like a bug under the heels of Disney’s lawyers. However, it was the rage at Sundance a few months ago, and I was lucky that Roger Ebert managed to book it for Ebertfest before he passed away.

The film follows the story of Jim, a husband and father of two, who travels with his family to the unnamed-yet-obvious Disney World. While there, he loses his job, and then slowly descends into the same sort of middle-aged-American-male self-involvement fantasy/horror world explored in films like David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Jim starts seeing his children and wife as demon obstacles. He fantasizes about two French teen girls, which he begins to stalk around the park. The dolls at the thinly-disgused It’s a Small World ride (from which the movie blissfully excises the music) leer at Jim with evil eyes. He starts seeing conspiracies and horrors in every corner, all steeped in corrupt sexuality and disease.

The film is entirely about adult male anxiety and the corruption of the American dream. Really, Disney is the perfect setting for the film. After seeing Escape from Tomorrow, I fully understand why they went through the risks and trouble to film there.

The film is definitely low-budget, often amateur, and far from perfect. Some of the green-screen work is cringe-worthy. The acting sometimes feels stilted. The pacing is awkward at times. Sometimes, the symbolism (and oh, there is much symbolism) seems half-baked. Sometimes, it feels like the film doesn’t quite know where it wants to go.

However, much of this is overwhelmed by the sheer audacity of the movie. Escape from Tomorrow is the sort of film that plunges into the deep end and swims like a motherf*cker. This is a movie that may not be entirely graceful, but it’s absolutely fearless. This is a film that is unafraid to look ridiculous. And I guarantee you, you’ve never seen anything quite like it.

But that still leaves the question of whether you’ll ever be able to see it. It does look like the filmmakers are working to make the film releasable. The film uses no Disney material aside from the visuals of the theme parks. (The music is all original, and no direct mention is made of Disney properties.) The cut of the film I saw at Ebertfest was 14 minutes shorter than the one screened at Sundance. There are currently scenes that have parts of the screen obviously blacked out to cover text or logos, and there was at least one point where a certain D-name was bleeped out (to great comedic effect). I also heard word from a professional critic at Ebertfest that they could conceivably pull it off.

So here’s hoping I can make “cat flu” jokes at you guys sometime in the future.

Escape from Tomorrow Q&A at Ebertfest. Director Randy Moore is in the middle, speaking into the mic. To the right are cast members Roy Abramsohn, Elena Schuber, and Annet Mahendru. To the left is editor Randy Moore Director
Soojin Chung.

Then you should join us at the Bryant Lake Bowl on Wednesday night, where there will be a fine social hour in the theater, followed by the recording of a short podcast with Jerry Belich, Bill Stiteler, Joseph Scrimshaw, and myself. This month’s theme: WINE AND WIZARDS.

And it’s free! (Well, you’ll have to pay for your own drinks, but it’s otherwise free!)

Wednesday, May 1
Social time at 6:00pm
Podcast at about 7:00pm

Bryant Lake Bowl
810 W Lake Street
Minneapolis, MN

If you do the Facebook thing, you can join the invite here:
https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/events/327074030754974/

…and you can follow the Drinking with Geeks community on Facebook here:
https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/events/327074030754974/

…and if you eschew all things Facebook and just want to hear podcasts, check out the website here:
http://www.drinkingwithgeekspodcast.com/

If devouring an obscene amount of movies in my daily life has taught me anything, it’s the fact that there is no such thing as a film that appeals to everyone. Every great classic has at least one hater. The trick is whether the hater can reasonably articulate their dislike, rather than just dismissing the film outright.

I’m sad to say that I’m probably In the Family‘s lone “hater”.

I’m not sad to say that because I feel I’m incorrectly alone on this. I’m sad because I clearly didn’t get the buoyant joy from seeing a great film, which apparently everyone else in the audience got. It’s much more fun to enjoy a film than it is to sit in a theater and pick it apart.

I’m also sad because even I can clearly see that In the Family is an earnest, original film that is clearly very well made. This is a bold film with good in its heart. Every single other person I talked to at Ebertfest named In the Family as their favorite film at the festival. It was my least favorite.

So I guess my trick will be to find a good reason for being the lone dissident.

(Before I proceed, I should clarify: I don’t hate this movie. I found it flawed, and I’m comparing it to a lineup where all other films I saw were extraordinary. The bar is high at Ebertfest.)

In the Family is the 2011 directorial debut of Patrick Wang, who also wrote, produced, and starred in the film. The film centers around a family structure that is drawing heated debate these days: a young boy being raised by two gay men. Since the story takes place in Tennessee, the two fathers aren’t married, which means that the plot is set in motion by the problems that occur when one of the men, the boy’s biological father, dies suddenly. The living partner (played by Wang) suddenly finds himself without claim to the boy he calls his son.

After seeing the film, I called it “Ozu with gay people” because Wang’s film seems to take a lot of lessons from Yasojiro Ozu, who made Japanese family dramas during the 1940s and 1950s. Scenes in an Ozu film, and in In the Family, happen in a slow, naturalistic way. The scene usually starts when a character enters the room, and it ends when they leave. What happens in between may or may not be entirely relevant to the story. Much is said in subtext. Personally, I find Ozu films more of a challenge than a pleasure. However, Wang, to his credit, seems to capture the good things about working in an Ozu style without getting bogged down.

I also give credit to Wang as a performer. The whole film orbits around his character, and the movie would collapse if Wang wasn’t a good actor. The character he plays is quite fascinating, too: a gay Asian-American home construction guru with a deep Tennessee drawl. The film is worth watching just to see this character in action.

But here’s the thing, the thing that sucked me out of the movie more than anything:

The main character really really really really feels like a Mary Sue to me.

Those of you who don’t read fan fiction are scratching your heads, so let me elaborate: a “Mary Sue” is a character in fiction that is a thinly-veiled idealized version of the author. Mary Sue characters tend to be a sort of wish-fulfillment, wherein the author essentially makes themself perfect (beautiful, intelligent, wise, well-liked, etc.); if the character is flawed at all, the flaw is endearing.

And, wow, for all the character’s uniqueness, the main character of In the Family sure does seem idealized. In fact the character doesn’t even have a dramatic arc. In the endgame of the film, a supporting character asks the main character what he’d sacrifice in order to achieve his goals, and the list provided are all things that the character offers to sacrifice at the beginning of the film.

I missed the Q&A after the screening, so I don’t know much at all about Patrick Wang (except he doesn’t have a Southern drawl in real life), but the fact that the same guy produced, wrote, directed, and starred in the film adds to the sense that this could be a Mary Sue situation. I have no idea if this is actually the case, but the suspicion was enough to take me out of the film.

The film could also benefit by trimming about 30 minutes of its runtime. There are a couple of scenes that don’t seem to contribute anything at all. They’re watchable scenes, but they’re extraneous.

Honestly, though, I wish I liked this movie. I loved that it is a family drama centered on an interracial gay couple. I loved that it is a movie tackles the legal issues surrounding same-sex marriage bans. I loved Wang’s Southern drawl. I wish it all pulled together for me.

Do I recommend it as a film to watch? Yes, I do. This is a smart and heartfelt film. If you’re hyper-tuned to writing tropes, though, your Spidey-sense might get triggered.

(P.S. — Wouldn’t it be nice to see a movie that centered around a gay couple, and the main drama of the film had nothing to do with the fact that they were gay? Perhaps someday…)

A shot from Paul Cox’s Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh, which recreates van Gogh’s “Bedroom in Arles”.

Paul Cox is the sort of director that film nerds should know about. He’s a well-known arthouse director in some circles, but overall, he seems to fly under the radar. His work only became known to me after I started attending Ebertfest a few years ago; Mr. Cox frequently attends the festival, and his films (as well as a documentary about his fight with cancer) have been featured at the festival several times.

Cox’s films are filled with beauty and life. His work tends to be enamored with simple pleasures, like good food, nature, music, and lovemaking. There is something very comfortable and home-like about his movies, even when he explores difficult questions about death and loss.

Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh (1987) feels like a very personal passion project for Mr. Cox, even though the film is entirely about Mr. van Gogh.

Most people know the name of Vincent van Gogh as that of one of the world’s great painters, who languished in poverty before he died of a gunshot wound in 1890. He worked as a painter for a decade, producing over 2,000 pieces of art; he only succeeded in selling one. What most people don’t realize, though, is that he was quite a writer as well. His letters to his brother Theo are heartfelt, frank, and deeply personal documents about his life.

Paul Cox’s film centers on van Gogh’s letters to Theo. The soundtrack of the film is merely actor John Hurt reading these letters, and this plays over a kaleidoscope of images from Paul Cox. The film’s imagery combines shots of van Gogh’s paintings (often in extreme close-up, to show the dimensionality of the paint) with images from the countryside that surrounded the painter’s life. At times, the camera captures light in the way that van Gogh captured it, finding the peculiar purples and blues of evening and shadow. At other times, the camera captures a full-out, moving recreation of an iconic painting.

The overall result is a film of great personal depth and rich beauty, one that should be accessible even to those who are not intimately familiar with the life or work of van Gogh. This film is not a history or an analysis; it is a record of a human being.

Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh is not available on streaming services at the moment, but it is readily available on DVD.

For now, here are some images from the non-movie-watching moments of this year’s Ebertfest adventure.

Tilda Swinton herself accompanied the screening of her film Julia, and she stuck around for a few days to watch some other films. She was very gracious with fans, as evidenced here. She looks as etherial in person as she does in movies, but she’s also completely fearless. By 11am Saturday morning, she was leading the entire theater in a huge dance-along to a Barry White song.

Ebert cake! Found at Pekara, a delicious coffeehouse near the Virginia Theater.

Mirko and me hitting the local dive bar, as per tradition.

GOJIRA! The Art Theater, just a few blocks from Ebertfest’s Virginia Theater, is a co-op arthouse theater, and they were playing the original Gojira at midnights during Ebertfest. Yes, Mirko and I attended a screening. Yes, we saw two people dressed as Gojira and the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man crushing boxes before the screening. Yes, there was rum involved. Yes, the original Gojira is a very slow film that shouldn’t be watched at midnight while boozy on rum.

I had another failed car-based time-lapse attempt on the way home. Here’s a trailer labeled SISTERS ON THE FLY. I have a dream that this somehow involved a clan of flying nuns.

I could not find a gas station in Tonica, IL, but I did find this lumberyard.

A green bridge somewhere in Illinois.

Just married!

The Bryant-Lake Bowl
801 W Lake Street, Minneapolis
10:00pm (doors at 9:30pm)

Arrive early and avail yourself of the BLB’s excellent food and beer list!

Tickets are $7 ($5 with a MN Fringe button), and can be purchased at the Bryant Lake Bowl website!
http://bryantlakebowl.com/calendar/shows/powerpoint-karaoke-14

If you do the Facebook thing, you can add the invite to your calendar here:
https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/events/638536266172969/

Please join us! Laugh! Drink beer!

P.S. — Can’t make it this month? Check this site’s calendar to find out when next month’s show will be: clickenzee das linken!

Self-portrait in the upstairs lobby

]]> http://tinlizardproductions.com/2013/04/19/ebertfest-day-2a/feed/ 0 http://tinlizardproductions.com/2013/04/18/ebertfest-day-1/ http://tinlizardproductions.com/2013/04/18/ebertfest-day-1/#comments Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:00:47 +0000 chebutykin http://tinlizardproductions.com/?p=1500 … Continue Reading →]]> So. Here I am.

I enjoy Ebertfest greatly. I’ve attended the film festival since 2009, and I find it to be a great, relaxing endeavor. The festival features only 12 films over the course of five days (compare that to Butt-Numb-a-Thon, which shows that many in 24 hours). The festival takes place in a gorgeous old theater in Champaign, IL, a small college town with a large number of gorgeous old buildings. Near the theater are restaurants I greatly enjoy. Near Champaign is Urbana, where my friend Mirko has a spare bedroom.

In the past, Roger Ebert hand-picked each film. This year is no exception, even though Mr. Ebert sadly passed away mere days ago.

I expected tears upon opening night. And yes, there were misty eyes, particularly when Roger’s wife, Chaz, took the stage for opening remarks while wearing Roger’s white scarf.

But Roger worked hard in recent years to make the festival sustainable outside his presence. Chaz said that Roger left behind a list of films that will keep Ebertfest running for years, and it sounds like the festival will be in the capable hands of Chaz, the Virginia Theatre, and the University of Illinois.

The festival opened last night with screenings of a short film by one of Roger’s Far-Flung Correspondents (I Remember, dir. Grace Wang), followed by Days of Heaven (1978) and a Q&A with Days of Heaven‘s second Director of Photography, the legendary Haskell Wexler.

Days of Heaven is a Terrance Malick film. For many film nerds, that will be all I need to say. Terrance Malick films are very Terrance Malick-y, and I think you either love or are indifferent to Terrance Malick.

I usually don’t engage well with Terrance Malick films. That’s a matter of personal taste, though, and not a flaw in Malick’s work. His films are kaleidoscopic and painterly. Gorgeous. However, I also find them emotionally distant to the point of being opaque.

But that’s just me.

Days of Heaven is no different. The film doesn’t engage me at my core. Part of the problem may be that I had a hard time understanding the voices in the film, so I missed about 50% of the dialogue. I’m not sure if that was an issue with how the sound was mixed in the theater, combined with accents and the fact that I’m kind of deaf, but there it is. If I watched the film again, I’d turn on subtitles. Still, the story is simple enough that I had no problem following along.

That said, the film is a feast for the eyes like no other. The two cinematographers (Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler, two of the greatest DPs to ever walk the planet) shot the film only in available light, almost entirely during the Golden Hour. The resulting images are achingly lovely.

The tale the film tells is incredibly simple. Two farm laborers, lovers who are masquerading as brother and sister, scheme to marry the woman to their dying boss so they can inherit his estate. The tale is told in minutiae and half-heard lines. The tone of the film is so steeped in beauty that you barely notice the ramp up to the film’s climax.

The Q&A after the film with Haskell Wexler was great, because he is currently 91 years old and still quite vibrant. He didn’t go much into talking about the production beyond what I already knew from IMDB, but it’s always much more fun hearing a real human tell those stories.

The locust attack, by the way, was created by throwing coffee beans out of a helicopter, then running the film backward. Amazing.

Recently, I purchased a glass mount and a power cord for my Sony DSLR, in hopes that I could shoot more sophisticated time-lapse movies during my long road trips. Thus, before I left town, I mounted the camera to the windshield of the car and set it to take a photo every 12 seconds.

The project ultimately failed. My car’s power inverter died (possibly a blown fuse), so the camera was left to run off its own battery. The battery died about 6.5 hours in. It also monsoon-rained during much of the drive, which means the individual photos were blurred by water and marred by the occasional windshield wiper.

The good news, though, is that the camera occasionally shot an interesting image, made dreamy by the blur and glare of the rain.

Eastbound 394, just outside Minneapolis.

I-94 Tunnel, Minneapolis

I-90/94, Wisconsin

I-90/94, Wisconsin, at 11:45 in the morning.

Exit between I-90 Eastbound and I-39 Southbound, near Rockford, IL.

I-39 Southbound, IL

I-39 Southbound, IL

The cast of Berlin Express, seen in front of the real rubble of post-WWII Germany.

The year was 1948. World War II had just closed, and the difficult job of cleaning up Germany was in progress. Over the rubble, the Allied powers collaborated, clashed, and ultimately sliced Germany into bits.

This is the backdrop of a very strange film noir named Berlin Express.

Berlin Express was the first Hollywood production filmed in Germany after WWII, and the film makes everything it can out of showing the real detritus of the war. Characters totter around in what seems an endless landscape of rubble. The film production went out of its way to grab as much documentary footage of blasted-out Berlin and Frankfurt as possible, and for that alone, this film is worth watching. The devastation, even three years after Germany’s surrender, is unearthly.

Yet the film has more to it than just its backdrop. Berlin Express is a tale of international intrigue, which strives to embody each of the Allied powers in an ensemble cast. There is a German doctor who is working to hash out peace in his country; there is his wary secretary of indeterminate European origin, who is scrambling to keep him safe; there is a Russian soldier who is suspicious of everyone; there is an American nutritionist, working to devise rations that will nourish the starving German population; there’s a British teacher; and there’s a French official. Everyone gets mashed together on a train headed to Berlin. When a bomb explodes on the train and kills the German, the mystery is afoot.

What follows is a complex web of intrigue. Some of it feels like it is taken verbatim out of the film noir handbook, and some scenes feel clumsy, but overall, Berlin Express is a complex and fascinating film to watch. This is a film that is unafraid to make the viewer work to keep up. Characters rattle off lines in untranslated French, German, and Russian, and though you don’t necessarily need to know what exactly they are saying, it is very important to pay attention. (The introduction of the secretary character involves her rebuffing strange men in a variety of languages.) The film introduces and establish characters in the blink of an eye. The film, made in 1948, also assumes a fairly high baseline of knowledge about WWII history, so you might want to refresh your memory about German reconstruction before going in.

But if that sounds like work, it’s worth it. Berlin Express was directed by Jacques Tourneur (of Out of the Past and Cat People fame), which means it goes full tilt film noir. Characters who are not what they first seem? Check. Shoot-outs in dramatically lit set-pieces? Check. Creepy-ass clowns? WHOA.

I’m so not kidding. FILM NOIR CLOWNS.

Berlin Express gets bonus film noir points for starring Robert Ryan, who you probably know from extraordinarily macho films like The Dirty Dozen and The Wild Bunch.

Berlin Express was completely unavailable on home video for many years, but you can now enjoy it through Vudu and the Warner Archives.

The Criterion Collection has a Tumbler, and yesterday they posted a photo of Les Blank’s coffin:

WOW. Mr. Blank is going out in style in a home-spun collaborative art piece.

I believe that is the greatest funeral idea in the world.

Screw somber, polished wood boxes with expensive metal trimmings. When I die, I want all you crazy people to bling the fuck out of my pine box. I want my coffin to look like a Michael’s craft store exploded. And when you’re done, I want you guys to wheel that thing into a crematorium, and then stash the glitter-and-bone ashes under a tree somewhere.

I also look forward to attending other funerals with DIY coffin art. Get on this, people!

Today, please tell me about an unusual job you once had (or, perhaps, still have).

Specifically, I was once a manager-on-duty and African cichlid expert for a shop that bred and sold pet fish. The shop wasn’t a run-of-the-mill mall-based pet shop. It was a place for aquarium super-nerds. We had about 30 employees on staff, with 6-7 working there at all times during the weekends, because the place would be elbow-to-elbow packed with customers. We worked our asses off there.

I worked there for many years.

Wikimedia Commons

It was today’s post at The Oatmeal that got me thinking about the fish store today, because we got mantis shrimp in the store all the time. As noted in The Oatmeal’s strip, a mantis shrimp is a gorgeous creature that can smack the holy hell out of you. It can deliver 1,500 Newtons of force with its front legs, in a motion that causes water to boil by supercavitation. It can kill prey without even touching it. It can also easily shatter a glass tank.

We’d sometimes order the mantis shrimp deliberately from our suppliers. They’d come to the store very well packaged, and we would carefully place them in little acrylic tanks. Acrylic could withstand their abuse, as it is not prone to shatter. It might crack, but it wouldn’t shatter.

Sometimes, though, we’d accidentally get a mantis shrimp. They would hitch a ride on the organism-coated reef rock, which we would buy and sell by the pound. Every once in a while, an employee would be looking at our (glass) reef tanks and they would cry, “AAAAA MANTIS SHRIMP!”

And then we’d have to try to catch the shrimp — out of a tank full of rock-made hidey places, mind you — without pissing it off.

A lot of people think fish, as a whole, are pretty dumb. The old thought goes that goldfish have no memory, so the little plastic castle in their bowl is always shiny and new.

But, really, many species of fish are rather clever. Aggressive fish, like African cichlids, have extremely elaborate mating rituals and ways of guarding territory. You actually have to carefully plan out exactly which fish you will put together in a cichlid tank, otherwise they’ll just kill each other.

We once had a two-foot-long dragon wrasse in the shop, a gorgeous, deep green, flat-bodied saltwater fish. He was in a 75 gallon tank by himself because he insisted on redecorating. A lot. He’d drag pieces of coral around the tank with his teeth, rearranging them like furniture. Then he’d leave them alone for a while. Then he’d get bored and start redecorating again. If you were wearing the employee uniform and you weren’t paying attention to him, he’d spit small rocks a the front glass.

Around that time, we also had a golden dogface pufferfish. He was about the size of a football and extremely expensive, so he was in the store for many months before someone brought him home. We named him Sparky.

While Sparky was there, everyone loved him. It helped that the face of a dogface puffer looks like, well, a puppy. He also behaved like one. If he knew who you were (as in, he recognized you as one of the employees that fed him), he would press his snout against the glass and wiggle his tail so violently that water would slosh out of the tank.

One day, Sparky learned a new trick. I was across the room from his tank, facing away. At the time, I had waist-length hair, so I must have been easy for him to recognize. I was also known as a Feeder. I heard him sloshing around behind me, so I knew he was doing his excitement-dance. I was busy, though, so I didn’t turn around.

Well, this was apparently too much for Sparky. I suddenly felt a jet of water hit my back.

I jumped about a mile, and then turned around. Sparky was sucking in water and spitting it out of the tank at me.

After I recovered from surprise, I rewarded him with some squid meat. Because, really, how awesome is it to have a fish that is trained to spit at people?

One of the first pieces of advice we gave to new employees was: wear rubber-soled shoes.

There were hundreds of tanks in the store, all of them containing electrical widgets like filters and pumps and heaters. Under such heavy and prolonged use, many of those electrical widgets eventually got a little ornery. If you forgot and wore non-rubber sandals, you’d reach into a tank and get a honey of a zap.

New employees learned this very quickly.

Winter Saturdays at the store were gruelling. It was the busiest day of our week, and because everyone in Minnesota had cabin fever, customers would flood the tropical-themed store.

We’d also get saltwater fish shipments in that day. Stacks of styrofoam coolers would arrive by plane, and then someone would pick up the boxes at the airport, and then we’d have to acclimate and stock the fish in tanks while also helping wall-to-wall customers. It was madness.

One of the suppliers would occasionally send us “extra” stuff. We were a big customer, so when they’d find something extra cool in their traps or nets, they’d send it along as a bonus. Sometimes, I don’t think they even knew what they were sending us.

Actually, I know that for a fact.

Because one Saturday, we got one of these.

From the Wikimedia Commons

We were putting fish away as fast as possible, so we didn’t look well at what we had in that bag. At a glance, it looked like an eel, so we put it in the eel tanks, which were down low, with open tops around waist level. After a bit of acclimation time, we sliced the bag open and set the animal loose in the tank.

A little while later, one of the employees asked, “Uh, does that look right?”

It wasn’t swimming like an eel. It also had nostrils.

We called the zoo and managed to get hold of a herpetologist. The herpetologist ran through an identification tree with us and…

(keep in mind that the store was packed with customers)

…identified the creature as a Belcher’s Sea Snake.

For those of you not immediately recoiling in horror, I’ll fill you in. The Belcher’s Sea Snake is the most poisonous snake in the world. It is 100 times more lethal than a Taipan. It isn’t an aggressive animal, so it isn’t considered particularly dangerous, but a milligram of its venom can kill a ridiculous amount of human beings.

And we had one in the store.

In open-topped tanks.

In open-topped tanks with tops at about the eye level of children.

We asked the zoo if they wanted the snake. The guy said, “No, it’s too dangerous. But I might want it for my personal collection…” Seeing the word “lawsuit” writ large, the employee on the phone said, no, we’ll take it from here.

Sadly for the poor snake, there was only one option from there. We were in a country that was very far from anyplace that would reasonably have antivenom for a Southeast Asian sea snake, and we couldn’t risk injuring anyone. The snake was very carefully removed from the tank, and then set outdoors in a bucket of water. The January weather took care of the rest, by cooling the reptile’s blood until it hibernated, then died.

The poor thing was scooped out of the ocean, packed in a box, flown halfway across the world, and then killed unceremoniously in a very cold parking lot.

The holiday party every year involved the owner of the store taking all the employees out for an enormous sushi dinner, followed by bowling. I remember a tradition of the sushi dinner involved specifically eating fish that you had kept as a pet in a tank.

We’d never sell live octopus in the store. Before I was employed at the shop, they attempted selling octopus. The creatures were hell to deal with. They’d never stay in their tank. They’d go roaming around the shop. They’d crawl into other tanks and eat the fish there. Never again.

But the shop also had a maintenance division, which means we had a few folks who would care for professional-sized tanks in restaurants, offices, and private homes. One of the maintenance division’s customers had a live octopus. That octopus was amazing. The customer would put food in a screw-top jar, screw on the top, and place the jar in the tank. The octopus would then unscrew the cap, eat the food, and then put the cap back on.

For the longest time, I’d tell this story to people, and they’d stare at me in disbelief. I am so glad I live in a world with YouTube now, because I can now show you that octopi loooooove screw-top jars.

Seriously. Go search YouTube for “octopus eats from jar”.

The site was a ton of fun for a few years. The project was a sort of group-effort comedy thing, and about 15 people contributed in some way. We made goofy Internet widgets, posters, movie reviews, pieces of fiction… whatever. If it somehow related to comedy, Cthulhu, or horror, it was fair game.

The inertia of the site fell apart when I no longer had time to manage it. Back then, each page had to be hand coded. Adding a link to a sidebar meant that hundreds of HTML files had to be altered one by one. (Thankfully, Adobe GoLive eventually automated processes like that.) I was the only person who had access to the site itself, so if anyone else wanted to upload content, it was up to me to do the dirty work.

These days, such a group effort would be so much easier. Set up a WordPress site. Give everyone accounts. Everyone gets to add their own content, whenever they want, and all they need to do is type and then hit post.

Every once in a while, the thought haunts me: I could resurrect Cthulhu Coffee so easily. I could probably pull a lot of the same people back into the fold. I know a bunch of new people who would fit in perfectly. All I’d need to do would be to install WordPress on the server I already pay for.

So seductive.

But then I look back at all of it. Yeah, it was good. Yeah, it was really funny at the time. But does any more really need to be said?

I keep thinking of Internet humor, memes in particular. The popular ones are hilarious when they first appear. And then the first variants appear, and a lot of them are hilarious, too. And then the flood happens. A few of the later variants are great, but most of the rest is noise. And then it all fades away. The reason this happens is that you can only carry one joke for so long. At some point, the joke goes into a coma, and all you’re doing is keeping it on life support. At the end, it’s better to stop the CPR and move on.

The funny Cthulhu thing has been done. A lot. By us and by others.

So, I just let the site sit out there. Every once in a while, someone stumbles across it, and e-mails me about something that made them laugh. Not bad for a site so ancient that it still references a webring.

Also, I’m still kind of proud of that blinking eyeball navigation bar.

Eleanor Parker as Marie Allen in Caged (1950)

When I say the phrase, “It’s a women-in-prison movie,” my guess is that your first impression is pretty far from what Caged actually is. The trope of a women-in-prison movie was well-worn in the exploitation era, which means it brings to mind things like scandalously torn clothing, shower scenes, and dramatic fights with lots of hair-pulling.

Caged is something else entirely, aside from the fact that its cast consists almost entirely of women. Warner Brothers made it in 1950, smack in the middle of the heyday of classic crime flicks, and it fits right in with the cinematic history of film noir seedy-reality morality plays. The plot involves a 19-year-old woman named Marie who is imprisoned for murder, though it is made clear in the opening scenes that she is a mousy, naive little thing, who only wound up in her predicament because her boyfriend talked her into a robbery that went wrong. She is also pregnant.

The film follows her story entirely, from the moment she is logged into the prison. She endures humiliation from inmates and staff at times, but also finds kindness. She struggles to find her way amidst the jail’s social structure; she fights to keep her baby, despite her incarceration; she rescues a kitten. Despite some soap-opera-like moments, Caged works to show the viewer what it’s actually like inside a women’s prison.

The film has an enormously sympathetic eye for most of its characters, in fact, regardless of whether they are prison staff or prison inmates. Marie’s fellow inmates are prostitutes, thieves, and murderers alright, but we learn why these women fell to such lows. The prison warden, played by the ever-amazing Agnes Moorehead, is a shrewd woman who is nonetheless very sympathetic to her flock; she recognizes more than anyone else that treating prisoners like animals only drives them deeper into a life of crime, so she does everything she can to lift them into better lives. She is, of course, stymied by people who are more interested in punishment, most notably by her larger-than-life prison matron, played with evil zeal by Hope Emerson.

Moorehead and Parker in Caged

The film is fascinating, particularly since it came out of the early 1950′s, right before women got stuck back in the proverbial kitchen in America. If you imagine the prison parts of Jimmy Cagney’s White Heat re-cast with all women, that’s kind of what Caged is like tonally. Sure, the women in Caged are in the clink for some different reasons (there’s usually a man involved in their backstories), but they are the same type of hard-nosed characters you see in men’s prison films of the era. They fight. They play cards. They deal cigarettes. They speak in slang and make shady deals.

Even more interesting is the fact that the screenplay for Caged was written by a woman by the name of Virginia Kellogg, based upon her story (co-authored by Bernard Schoenfeld), Women Without Men. Kellogg deliberately had herself incarcerated in a women’s prison in order to write the story. She has said that the story wasn’t so much a screenplay as it was an almanac of what she saw during her time there.

Oh, did I mention that she also wrote the aforementioned crime classic White Heat?

Aside from the fascinating script, Caged also features some swinging-for-the-fences performances. It’s a treat of a film for anyone interested in crime flicks.

Caged is currently available for streaming rental on iTunes and Vudu.

Roger and Chaz Ebert at Ebertfest 2012

I can credit my intense love of movies to two people: my mom and Roger Ebert. I used to watch Sneak Previous and At the Movies religiously, and I’d make note of the movies I was too young to see, but would undoubtedly seek out when I was older. Mom is the person who would put those tapes in my hands… or at least patiently tolerate whenever I’d catch something a bit advanced on HBO.

Those TV shows, of course, were a joint effort between Siskel and Ebert, but Ebert was the one I connected with. Siskel was a smart guy, but Ebert knew something that most critics don’t realize: highbrow art and lowbrow art are both art. Ebert could defend summer blockbuster fare as easily as he could defend a Fellini film. He also knew how to talk about folks like Fellini and Bergman in a way that felt accessible. He could guide you around the subtler points of the cinema without making you feel dumb for missing details on the first go.

I started attending Ebertfest in Chambana, IL, only a few years ago, after Ebert already had his jaw removed. He’d always put in a few appearances at the film festival, but it was clear that it was difficult for him to get around. He’d use his computer to speak to us, and would gesture charmingly with his hands as the digital voice spoke for him. The removal of his jaw left him with a permanent smile upon his face, but when he was in the Virginia Theater with us, that smile always looked like something he’d choose to wear anyway. The Virginia Theater felt like his home, and he made us all feel welcome.

Over the few years I’ve been to Ebertfest, Roger’s amazing wife Chaz has been taking on more of the MC duties of the festival. It’s always a delight to see her, too. She’s the sort of person whose smile is larger than life.

Last year, Chaz was MC for the festival almost the entire time. If I remember right, I only saw Roger in the theater once. That’s when I snapped the photo above.

I never did get to thank Mr. Ebert in person. I’m not too disappointed by that, though. He seemed to always be surrounded by people who loved him and his life’s work. I would have just been one more voice in the crowd. I got to watch movies with him, and that’s an honor.

This year’s Ebertfest happens in two weeks. I wish he could have made it to one last Ebertfest, because he would carefully select each film specifically because he felt it hadn’t been seen by enough people. He had already selected this year’s slate of films. He wanted to share these films with us. It’s a shame he won’t see that giant old moviehouse packed one last time, packed with people excited to share the moviegoing experience with him.

My heart goes out to Chaz and to all my critic friends who knew Roger much better than I did. We’re all going to miss him.

DNA codes for amazing things, like hemoglobin and eye color and entire spleens. It also can code for very odd abilities, like double-jointedness and the ability to wiggle your own ears.

Or, DNA aside, you could have just spent many hours of your life learning how to stick spoons to your face.

Quick, tell me about your stupid human tricks.

I can roll my tongue.

This new site, called The Sound and the Foley, is dedicated to identifying and researching the history recycled sounds and melodies. From the Wilhelm Scream to the “Shave and a Haircut” ditty, these sounds are famous and ubiquitous, and yet we usually know nothing about them.

And have you ever tried searching Google for a series of notes you know nothing about? It’s tough.

The first couple posts are live now. Go have a look!