All in Film
Gabriel: Now, when we had to leave last time, you were telling me about a Vietnam project of some kind.
Lloyd: Yeah, through the Roan group. www.roangroup.com. It has nothing to do with Troma. It’s totally separate, and my name shouldn’t be associated with Roan.
G: Okay.
About ten years ago, I was wasting my life on a shitty horror movie website. It doesn’t exist anymore. Badly run in every conceivable fashion, I quit after deciding that they were never going to pay me the hundreds of dollars they owed me at that point. I put in a little over a year. The work itself was fine. Hell, it was usually a lot of fun. I wrote reviews for dozens of films, connected with a number of independent filmmakers and DVD release companies, and interviewed a ton of really great names. Despite the appalling mediocrity of the website itself, I conducted interviews, on behalf of the site, with the likes of George A. Romero, Lance Henriksen, Jeffrey Combs, Tony Todd, Sid Haig, Bill Mosely, and many others.
“You’ve seen The Hospital?”
This was a small conversation I had the other day. The guy I was talking to, probably in his mid-30s, scoffed. “Of course I’ve seen The Hospital.”
Not of course. Fuck you. I can count on both hands the number of people I’ve met who have seen that movie, and I’d probably still have a few fingers left.
For me, there is no significant joy in being a member in good standing of a movie fan club whose membership numbers are somewhere in the low double digit range.
For virtually as long as people have existed and kept records, they have returned to a single question. What does it mean to be human? Moreover, what does it mean to be an unique individual with self-awareness, gender, and a sexual identity? First theater, with the opportunity to portray fictional characters, tackled this question, most famously in Shakespeare’s “To be, or not to be” speech.
Guys, I think I’m finally over Tim Burton.
“What took you so long?” is the response I’ve been getting from at least a few people. I don’t know if that’s fair. Burton’s work from about 2000 onwards has been consistently inconsistent. We get a movie like Big Fish or Sweeney Todd. Then we get wretched turd carnivals like Dark Shadows or Alice in Wonderland, or we get something that’s not terrible per say, but also ends up being oddly unsatisfying.
"T. Anderson can never be free—that is the beginning and end of the story. If he thinks he is freeing others, he is wrong. He is not."
The Oscars have been over for a while, and I find myself thinking about the way the awards doom otherwise good movies to unreasonable scrutiny, and ultimately, dismissal. There is a long list of Best Picture winners that I personally wouldn’t call the best movie of the year. In many cases (for some reason, I keep thinking of The Artist right now), I wouldn’t even call them the best movie amongst the nominees for that year. Despite the fact that no one allegedly cares about the Oscars, Best Picture winners tend to piss off an awful lot of people.
How did you guys get through December and January? Well enough?
I guess we should be pleased that 2017 hasn’t destroyed us all yet. We can still go to the movies. We can still try to get excited about everything that’s coming out this year. There a number of 2017 movies that I’m at least curious about. That counts for something. The ongoing hells of 2016 made it difficult to focus on cinema. At least, that was my problem. Beyond the real world making it difficult to even pay attention to trailers, too many actual 2016 movies left me underwhelmed.
You turn on your television in the middle of the night – you can’t sleep again – and start flipping channels. You haven’t been sleeping well lately and you’re not sure why. Yes, you’re quickly approaching your fiftieth birthday and no, you haven’t published that novel or collection of short stories. But you have friends and loved ones and a nice place to live and a job with a health plan. You should be sleeping.
I considered myself a knowing college sophomore. In my world literature survey, out of a class of thirty students meeting once a week in the evening, I understood the homoerotic love on display in Mann’s Death In Venice. I remember my professor’s keener interest when I raised my hand that Monday night and suggested that Aschenbach’s interest in the beautiful Tadzio was more than aesthetic. I was sure I had impressed my classmates, though most of them were taking this particular class just to keep the required English credit to a more harmless weekly event.
Captain Canada rides into 2017 with a look at Fellini and horror.
