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Rebelling Against THE OUTLAW

THE OUTLAW (1943; director: Howard Hughes)

As a sordid “sex western”, this hasn’t aged well. Also, there’s not one soul on Earth who praises it for good acting, tight pacing or making a nickel’s worth of sense.

Even Jane Russell’s legendary bra for this film, custom designed by hornball Howard Hughes to cantilever Russell’s already-abundant breasts to look like nothing short of two Boeing B-17 bombers in her dress, wasn’t actually used on camera (according to Russell).

See this in the 21st century and watch one of the cinematic scandals of the 1940s reveal itself as clumsy and quaint, impotent and befogged.

With its shocks worn down to nothing and its gasps turned into yawns, what’s left today is still one strange piece of pulp, nonetheless.
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I Don’t Believe in Ghosts, But I Do Believe in A GHOST STORY

A GHOST STORY (2017; director: David Lowery)

In 2017, we could use a reminder that movies don’t have to be loud enough that your ears ring for three days afterward. Movies don’t all need to shove you onto a rollercoaster that loops through a dozen explosions before it careens into a brick wall. No one needs to overact their way to an Oscar. An entire CGI city doesn’t need to blow up. Musical crescendos don’t need to pound you into cerebral dislocation. We don’t need a cut every three seconds. Movies don’t need to be filled with noise like an amateur radio show that’s terrified of one second of dead air.

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The Importance of Female Wrestlers for a Growing Boy

GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (2012; director: Brett Whitcomb)

The women of GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling will never forget the years from 1986 to 1990 when they grappled with each other every week on syndicated national television while dressed in skimpy showgirl outfits.

I understand completely.

I was a preteen when GLOW was on the air and I can’t forget it, either. Never in my life have I been as big a sports fan as when I sneaked peeks at all-girl wrestling on TV when I was 11 years old. It was a challenge. GLOW was not the kind of thing that you could watch with your family (or at least I couldn’t). No, a boy had to spend time with this alone. It was all girls in skintight costumes flinging each other across a wrestling ring and, for that, a young man needs some privacy in order to properly sort through his feelings. That’s just how this particular path works. In retrospect, I think I only got to watch GLOW twice back then, but both experiences made valuable contributions to my pubescent years. Especially when that blonde in the little denim shorts showed up.
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Discovering the REAL YOU with The Platters’ ENCORE OF GOLDEN HITS

Sometimes I get to thinking that I’m a real mean guy. A hard ass, a walking scowl, one gruff customer, a storm system coming in from the south, a beer bottle that’s been pissed in, a bruised banana, a carcinogenic soul with an abortion clinic dumpster for a heart, a dead dandelion in a winter field, a tornado that carries away your kitten, a broken cookie jar, bad news in old blue jeans, a hair in your fettuccine alfredo, a spoonful of bitter medicine that doesn’t help, a straight-up jerk, a bad dream, a bus station restroom, a carton of curdled milk, a human skull that you find in the grass on your Easter picnic, a soiled towel, one foul fella.

I think you get the picture.

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The Pretty Good PIGGS by the Pretty Great Neal Barrett, Jr.

Subterranean Press, 2002

Battered, Ebay purchased copy.

In literature, I love dirty, sleazy, white trash Texas.

I love sweaty, bloody, cum-stained Texas.

Barefoot, whiskey-breath, evil-eyed Texas.

Strip club, gun rack, conceal carry Texas.

Big-talkin’, neon sign, tornado warning Texas.

I love books that make all us Texans look like felons with barbecue sauce stains on our shirts. Or good Bible-thumping people just one cool breeze away from scandalous sex with the church organist.

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Getting Lost With Bela Lugosi and The Invisible Ghost (Blu-Ray review)

People have been wondering why I’m in such a good mood lately. They tell me that there’s a glow to my skin and an extra spring in my step. They ask me if I’m in love or if I’m enjoying the spring weather or if I’m on prescription medication.

I honestly have no idea what these people are talking about.  My best guess is that I’m just happy that there’s  a really nice new Blu-ray for the 1941 movie, The Invisible Ghost, put out by Kino Lorber.

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Calder Willingham’s TO EAT A PEACH

Calder Willingham

To Eat a Peach

Mayflower-Dell, 1966 reprint (original printing 1955)

Calder Willingham is a sarcastic creep and that’s why I like him. This is a novel of summer camp sexual tension as written by the biggest jerk this side of Pluto and it’s deeply funny. No “couple” here belongs together (I put “couple” in quotes because most of these pairings never quite get the plug to reach the socket). The thirtysomething married woman who lusts after a 19-year-old slab of brainless beefcake who merely thinks that she’s acting like his mom could be the most hopeless case. Then, there’s the 46-year-old camp second-in-command who can’t stop thinking about the shapely teenage girl who’s there to mind the horse stable. Meanwhile, when that girl isn’t riding horses daily (double entendre alert!), she’s got an adversarial-slash-flirtatious thing going on with a frustrated bohemian kid who writes the camp newsletter and suppresses his godless, anti-authority, ticking-time-bomb personality for the job. When sex does happen here it’s… nothing much. Just meat slapping against meat. It’s a climax that isn’t much of one. How things change (or not change) afterward is what matters. It’s what Willingham, that jerk, leaves us trying get a grip on at the end.

This is one of the good “dirty books” of the 1950s. It was too puerile to be seen as serious literature, but too well-written, too full of character and with not enough raw sex to be pornography. Some readers in the 1950s probably kept this hidden from polite company. In 2017, its wicked sense of humor keeps it readable. I blew through it in two days.

 

 

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Getting Serious About MY LITTLE PONY

A Brony Tale (2014, director: Brent Hodge)

I have never watched a single episode of the long-running My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic TV series and after viewing this documentary about its rabid fan following of adult men of all ages, races, waistlines and degrees of baldness, I am now terrified of catching even a glimpse of it.

My big fear: WHAT IF THIS SHOW IS AS MIND-BLOWING AS THESE PEOPLE SAY IT IS? What next?

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