The context of a city and FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (92)

I've been living in San Francisco for two and a half months now and I'm slowly, oh so slowly, starting to feel like I actually live here. I've never really moved to a city I've had so little contact with before. I lived in Portland, briefly, but I'd spent weekend upon weekend there learning the layout, the neighborhoods, the "scene" so when I got there everything was already established in my head.

San Francisco on the other hand is a placed I've moved to with almost no concept of these things. I moved here on a beautiful, amazing whim, and have been, in a wonderful way, forced to to discover the workings of the city on my own. Or to some degree on my own, my knowledge of the city has been filtered through Alex's knowledge of the city, as she's been my most constant companion, and to many degrees my guide in the city, giving me spots to eat at, or ideas of things to do.

What I find the strangest about this sort of move is that with no context I really have no preconceptions of the area. I walk around in this city as if every neighborhood is the same, each and all blank slates that I'm just discovering. I was thinking this morning about my recent trip to the courthouse, going over in my head why I didn't bike there, and then thinking to myself that maybe locking up my bike outside the courthouse might be a dangerous thing for the little yellow fellow. But, I have no idea. The area of the city in which the courthouse is, because I haven't been here long enough to really grasp the areas of the city deemed "dangerous" by the population at large, is just as any other is, a spot of buildings and streets filled with people.

It's honestly, really refreshing. I'm actually being given the chance to create my own biases. Where in Seattle, I grew up knowing which areas were "cool" or "dangerous" or "ghetto" or what not, here, I've got nothing. Everything's new and I don't have to hurdle my own mental roadblocks to appreciate or accept anything.

Just a thought.

I'm tired of 1950s horror films. Perhaps I've always been tired of them and this recent one-two punch of Criterion sponsored '50s horror schlock has dredged those feelings up to the surface. Not to say that watching brain-stemmed monsters hanging from trees, flying in to broken windows and devouring people's spinal cords wasn't entertaining, I'm just sick of innocuous dialogue and the sort of lightness these sort of films embody.

And I'm not saying that I don't love horror movies and all their gory tomfoolery. No no, it's a favorite genre of mine, I just like my blood-soaked massacres with a little more vim and vigor.

Fiend Without A Face (92) was certainly interesting, but I just sort of blanked out on the last forty minutes. Looking up from whatever else I might've been doing to chuckle at an old man getting brain-sucked by a mental vampire cerebellum complete with antennae eyes and gruesome sticker things. After the realization that film was about nuclear fear, and the Commies, and all that good natured 50s paranoia, I just sort of fell in to a bored stupor while watching the film. Maybe it's the fact that films like Sisters (89) and Kwaidan (90) set the bar exceptionally high for smart, innovative horror, and these films just come across as tasteless blobs of sugar.

Regardless, I'm happy to be moving on.

Friday: Black Narcissus (93)

What to say and THE BLOB (91).

I staring off in to space right now at a bro-y coffee shop near my house, my brain still a little clogged with mucus, surrounded by equally disconnected laptop zombies, and I can't think of a single interesting thing to start this blog with. It's just one of those days.

Perhaps I could attempt to scrounge something from this sort of booze-soaked brain of mine, really dig deep to enlighten you with some sort of golden nugget from this hallowed brain pan. But, I'm not going to do that.

I'm going to speculate a bit on The Blob (91) and call this a short one.

It's a strange jump for Criterion to move from Kwaidan (90), the sort of end-all-and-be-all of 1960s Japanese horror films to The Blob (91), easily one of the more American films made in the pleat-pants death throes of the 1950s. Where Kwaidan (90) is nearly a think piece, a quiet, spooky, immaculately pieced together bit of psychological horror, The Blob (90) is a small, dumb, gee shucks wedge of Americana that just doesn't exist anymore. It's a drastic change, but there's something really interesting about seeing what a few thousand miles and decade can do to the way we perceive horror.

A few thoughts on The Blob (91):

- Steve McQueen is in this film. Yes, that Steve McQueen. The crease-faced hero of films like Papillion and The Getaway and Bullitt, a sort of defining male icon in Hollywood for many years. And in this film he plays a slump shouldered, honest to goodness, American youth who just can't make those darn adults believe him. McQueen had been in a handful of television shows before this, and one movie, but this was one of his first starring roles, and it's an absolute shock that in the constricting land of 1950s Hollywood he was ever able to find a way out of that role.

- This film, as it was marketed, was less a horror film and more a film about teen angst and rebelling against your parents. It's awesome, Steve McQueen and his sweetheart (whatever her doe-eyed name might be) keep telling parents that there's this rolling jellybean of death picking off the townsfolk, and they keep failing to listen and the barbeque bag that is The Blob continues to kill people, old people that is. Lesson to you old-timers: believe the children or face death by a gelatinous mass.

- I'm enjoying the shit out of this old, stupid little film. Criterion, my faith in you grows with each day. I will build you an alter, a gigantic alter that features stacks of your film glued together with, er, super glue, and there will be a frilly liner made of shaved troll hair in a variety of neon colors. I will stand in front of this alter and I will scream out loud each day the name of my favorite Criterion films and hopefully you, sweet Criterion Gods, will look down on me and smile ... and give me free shit.

Friday: The Blob (91)

Headaches, for various reasons, and KWAIDAN (90)

As you may have noticed, I've been a bit slow on the blog-kick lately, this hot on the heels of a inner-proclamation that yes, I'd be kicking this here Criterion Quest blog in to high gear. Well, for once, for sweet-toothed once, I have excuses, body-related excuses! And for you, those:

- I've been sick the last few days. Not a sniffle, nasal blockage, spot-of-a-headache sort of jaunt either, no siree, this has been, at least to my knowledge, some sort of real deal fever-wracked-lying-in-bed-sweaty-as-a-clam-on-meth flu-type battle. Honestly, I spent all of Monday evening, and most of Tuesday morning in a fitful, almost hallucinogenic bout of sickness. I was too weak to lift an arm, let alone type a blog, and though I was wracked with regret, I chose sweaty slumber over blogging.

- I've given up, temporarily caffeine. Yes, the sweet liquid that has driven me, and at most times my income for so long is temporarily being expunged from my body. I've been trying to keep a diary of the various stages of symptoms and withdrawals and such and such, but all I can really attest to in terms of these things so far is a pretty steady headache (at one point on Saturday my face seriously felt like an exploding light bulb) and the fact that exactly one day after quitting the delightful amphetamine, my body was invaded by flu-like aliens. Why am I doing this? Good question. Something about finding out just what it feels like to be deprived of something I've consumed so much of in the last three or four years of my life. I don't want a crutch, be it cigarettes, be it religion, be it booze or caffeine, so lets see what happens when I jettison in to the great abyss. Maybe, maybe I just want to test my willpower.

Thus, headaches abound, fevered, dry-lipped headaches, and the aching need for something that'll speed me up just a bit. So please, excuse a bit of lag.

The Japanese really scoot my clouds, filmically speaking that is. The way they look at the medium, and the way, perhaps, they just look at the basics of life is so much different, so much calmer and with more introspection. This is readily apparent in the beautiful, foursome of "horror" stories that is Kwaidan (90).

Each of these stories, seemingly based on a color or a season even, follows a haunted character. But in Japan you aren't haunted by ghosts in sheets with eye holes chopped out. Oh no, you're haunted by memories, by regrets, by history, and by the dark spaces that lurk in your own brain. In Kwaidan (90) you don't have startling musical cues, and grotesquely make-upped gore-hounds, oh no, you have slow silence and some of the creepiest sound effects to ever grace this Earth. I was lying in bed, or sitting at my kitchen table, or squeezed next to Alex's fully functioning new sewing machine, just shivering with fearful delight as a branch cracked, or a blast of mist rolled down a set of stone stairs. These are stories about the things that haunt all of us, whisked back in to an era of traditional Japan many of us know nothing about. There's samurais and monks and long-haired spinsters, mixed with impetuous princesses and funny-hatted lords all tangled in creepy snow, and giant eyes, and a trio of unkillable samurais that might just drive you mad. Fantastic.

Most intriguing about the Japanese take on the ghost-tale is that these "ghosts" aren't feared as much as their accepted as a real part of life. Yes, to protect one's self, often times you must take certain measures to ward these ghostly beings away, but, not because these beasts are inherently trying to harm you. They're just a part of the world like anything else, and we must move along with them with as much patience as we do anything else. It's an interesting way of viewing it.

What struck me as amazing is that this beautiful, quiet, at times even simple piece of film was, when filmed, the most expensive Japanese movie ever made. If you'd given that sort of money, today, to a horror director, you'd have three-second edits, explosive light flares and a big-eyed child scribbling circles on wax paper.

And yes, the long haired, shrieking female horror of modern day J-horror, has basis in historical Japanese horror films. That I will admit.

Thursday: The Blob (91)