Deaths of salesmen

Glengarry Glen Ross

(1992)

This is stagy as hell, but when you have a playwright and a cast like you have here, you don't really need car chases. Mametian words and syllables, sentences and overlapping sentence fragments; Pacino and Lemmon and Arkin and Spacey and Harris and Baldwin and grotesque, gruesome, grueling desperation; what's not to grimace?

But I've had enough, and it's time for someone else to take my copy--and while you're at it, click here for other giveaways.

Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!

Ghostbusters

(1984)

Has Rick Moranis ever been funnier than this?

28 Days Later

(2002)

I keep waiting for this to reach its sell-by date, the screening when I think, "Well, yeah, this is pretty good, but it's not really as wonderful as I remembered it." Not yet. And good golly, the deserted London sequence . . . if I keep coming back to that, it's because that sequence still wows me, every time.

Oh, but here's something I've been thinking about over the Halloween season: if we ever are infested by zombies, we've certainly seen enough of them in movies and on TV by now to know how to handle 'em, no?

Consumer culture

Halloween

(1978)

Have I ever told you about the first time I ever saw this movie? Not in 1978, when I was married with a small child and unlikely ever to go to a scary movie, but during a second run in 1981, when I was separated and living in a $90/mo. basement shithole apartment in downtown Champaign and the picture showed at the Rialto and, having heard from enough of my grad school colleagues that I should, I went to the late screening on maybe the final night of the run. In any case, I was . . . the audience . . . the entire audience. And then, after watching this eminently creepy film alone, I had to walk alone home to my dark apartment, where I was also alone, and . . . well, you get the idea.

Even tonight, as I near 60 and should be immune to things that go bump in the night, it was still plenty creepy walking around my mostly dark home after watching it, and then walking downtown to the Chinese restaurant to pick up some dinner. It was particularly ill-advised, I think, for someone to have hopped out of his or her car and walked behind me on the sidewalk dragging his or her feet in the dry leaves.

Dawn of the Dead

(2004)

Funny that I never noticed before the extent of the borrowing here from my favorite zombie film, which is on tap for tomorrow night: fast-moving zombies, invocation of a culture of hate, aerial shots of apocalyptic infernos, protective figures gone bad. But hey, this is in Wisconsin, and who ever set a zombie flick in Wisconsin before? Or cast indy darling (and now bigtime writer/director) Sarah Polley in a kickass role or Ving Rhames as . . . well, Ving Rhames? So this remains my second-favorite zombie film.

Mommies dearest

Alien

(1979)

Much was made in 1986 of the distinctly nonfeminist epithet Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, duh) shouts at the climax of the wo-mano a wo-mano showdown in Aliens--the rough equivalent to an African American wielding the n-word--but I don't recall anyone pointing out that she utters the exact same epithet to Mother, the computer on the Nostromo, in this film.

Aliens

(1986)

Halloween season is not the time to watch this; it should be a Mother's Day tradition. This remains the best cinematic rebuttal to the notion that "maternal" and "feminist" need be mutually exclusive.

Oh, incidentally, yes, these were both theoretically eligible for Friday-night deaccession, but forget it: these aren't leaving my collection.

Trapped trapped trapped 'til the cage is full

Cronos

(1993)

Guillermo del Toro's first feature, and much of his toolbox is in evidence: bugs, magical machines, a child in peril both mortal and metaphysical, and Ron Perlman. Last night I watched my all-time favorite vampire movie, but this one is right up there, and while that one has competitors in the subgenre of youthful vamp romance, this one is conceptually sui generis.

Endless love

A Halloween-season supernatural romance double feature.

Wristcutters: A Love Story

(2009)

This:

• has one of the wittiest fantasy premises I've ever encountered (though credit for that goes to the novel it's based on, Kneller's Happy Campers)
• is one of the best Wizard of Oz films I know;
• is one of the best romantic comedies of the millennium to date;
• is the best suicide comedy imaginable;
• is one of my all-time favorite road movies;
• is one of my all-time favorite buddy movies;
• has a terrific soundtrack, which introduced me to Gogol Bordello;
• [spoiler alert] makes me weep happy tears at the end.

I've been plugging this film since I first saw it, and as far as I know, I've converted only my daughter. Seriously, check this out. A smart, funny, sweet, weird, unique film.

Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In)

(2008)

This:

• is my favorite vampire movie, by a couple orders of magnitude;
• is my favorite film about preadolescent (with an asterisk) love;
• has the best mass-transit getaway final scene at least since The Graduate, though it must be said that while that film's final scene is brilliant for its ambiguity regarding the future of an oddly matched pair, there's no ambiguity in this final scene: we've already seen this couple's future.

Hard to imagine a more satisfying seasonal twin bill.

Sin never dies

Carrie

(1976)

Wow: no, I certainly had not ever seen this uncut before: I would have remembered Brian De Palma's slo-mo girls'-locker-room full-frontal-fest, complete with that distinctive lame '70s music that was the aural equivalent of soft focus. I realize that this is at least my second complaint in the past few weeks about gratuitous sex and/or nudity, making me sound like the grumpy old man I am, but come on: is there any reason other than the fact that being able to show pubic hair in a mainstream film was still pretty new in 1976?

OK, now let's dispose of Piper Laurie: she makes Carrie's mother scary in an old-Bette Davis/Joan Crawford movie way, in stark contrast to Moore's honest-to-god (!) scary-human-being portrayal. The only part of Laurie's portrayal that is better--and the credit may go to De Palma--is her orgasmic response to her fatal multiple penetration by kitchen blades, a blend of Saints Sebastian and Teresa.

Overall, this is consistently the lesser of the two films through the dumping of the pig's blood and (apart from the goofy shtick with the firehoses) consistently the better one after that, in part because Peirce seems a little too concerned with justice for those who haven't been shitty to Carrie, but mostly because it gets to the end with much more dispatch. And gee whilikers, that final scene: a scary movie classic.