a night in

(ETA: Well, your proprietor has been made to look and feel like a tit, what with this episode disappearing from the schedule. Again.)

Your proprietor doesn't trust the sun that has peeked through a rainstorm that's been battering San Francisco for the better part of the day. One suspects the rain will return in earnest rather soon. But here at the House of Sparrows we're practically hoping for a rainy gloomy night, in anticipation of a half hour of television that has been oft-delayed, but eagerly awaited...



Based on one of my favorite comics, Batman: The Brave and the Bold has been a delightful destination for early Friday evening viewing. Though slightly more kid-friendly than other iterations of the DC comics universe, B:TBATB has captured the truly gonzoid spirit of the team-up comic upon which it is based, which mined the teaming of Batman with lesser-known heroes for some offbeat stories. At worst it's a diverting and entertaining superhero cartoon; at best (as in a truly sublime teaser which teamed Batman with Detective Chimp to solve a locked room mystery), it can be downright thrilling.

I've been keen to see tonight's episode for a number of reasons. "Chill of the Night" concerns Batman's quest for the killer of his parents. Heavier subject matter than the show's usual beat, which may account for its continued postponement. But also notable is the fact that the episode brings back writer Paul Dini (one of the driving forces behind the justly lauded "dark deco" Batman: The Animated Series) to the Batman fold. Kevin Conroy, the voice of Batman for many years, also steps in to provide the voice of the Phantom Stranger. Given the Phantom Stranger's household god status here at the house of Sparrows, tonight's episode pretty much commands your proprietor's attention.

The episode airs in the show's usual timeslot (Friday night, 7:30pm) on Cartoon Network. If you tune in, comment and tell me what you thought, and thus become a friend of the House of Sparrows forever.

the Rondo Awards

A nice and respected by-fans-for-fans set of awards honoring the best in horror. Your proprietor is thinking about the various nominees. I'll likely write in No Name and Balrok as Best Horror Hosts for their booze-addled antics, genial comic timing, and generally contagious (if a mite fratboy-ish) enthusiasm for the lowest-rent horror on Creepy KOFY Movie Time, 'cause those motherfuckers make me laugh.

Meanwhile, fave blog Arbogast on Film offers some well-reasoned advocacy for Frankensteinia and its proprietor Pierre Fournier, so I'll likely follow his lead.

Voting closes early April. Vote early and oft--I mean, once.

MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE

A long, long train rolls by behind the credits. Havenhurst and Vargas, two homicide detectives from a different (and better, if more conventional) film, have their morning rounds interrupted by an 1154 call. Someone's dead.

The setup for this long-awaited David Lynch/Werner Herzog collaboration is juicy indeed, including a glancing encounter between Havenhurst (Willem Dafoe) and Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon). But once McCullum barricades himself in his home with a pair of hostages, all we can do is watch as the pieces of McCullum's bizarre history assemble, and wait for the situation to reach a boiling point. Or, in this case, not.

Over the course of the last several years, Herzog has been quickly lapsing into self-parody: the anti-nature ranting and bemusement over his human subjects' folly became tiresome in ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD. But while some of his routine had been skewered by the gonzo energy of Nicolas Cage in THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, the familiar Herzog tropes roll by in MY SON, etc. as if on a checklist. Though clearly supported and indulged by producer Lynch here, the styles of the two directors prove less than their sum (and there's some Lynchian checklisting here too, as Grace Zabriskie gives the same performance she's given in every Lynch project she's appeared in since TWIN PEAKS). Herzog tries to accommodate some Lynchian shots of suburban torpor-turned-hell, but his obsession with hard, ego-damaging reality doesn't mesh with Lynch's nightmares.

As for lead Michael Shannon, he offers another dangerously unhinged character to his gallery, but one wonders if he's able to grasp a character whose life is grounded in more conventional psychology. Giving him space here to make the attempt might have lent some context to his escalating derangement, but Shannon plays every scene in the same dully insistent monotone.

There's a growing audience for Herzog's comedy of detachment, and the numerous shots of flamingos and ostriches will surely tickle this crowd (as they did at the screening your proprietor attended). Those hoping that a producer with as strong an auteuristic bent as Herzog's would send him into new territory will be disappointed.

Here's hoping Absurda yields better material with King Shot, if financing allows.

44 INCH CHEST

As in SEXY BEAST, the previous collaboration between screenwriters Louis Mellis and David Scinto, 44 INCH CHEST begins with an examination of actor Ray Winstone's body at home. But unlike the previous film, which began with Winstone well-fed, sun-baked, and relaxed by the pool, Winstone (here playing gangster Colin Diamond) lies barely breathing, like a beached whale, amid the wreckage of his marriage, his home, and indeed his life. We soon learn some of the details of his wife's infidelity, and a desperate, barely coherent phone call from Colin quickly brings a small army of friends to his support.



Said friends turn out to be a veritable rogues gallery of Britain's Most Dangerous Men, from the pragmatic Archie (Tom Wilkinson) to gay and dangerous gambler Meredith (executive producer Ian McShane) to old school foul-mouth Old Man Peanut (John Hurt), who immediately kidnap the boyfriend for a tete-a-tete with Colin. Colin is reeling from the betrayal, and remains indecisive about the boyfriend's fate, even as his friends wait itchily but patiently on the sideline, all too eager to get their licks in.

The story in many ways seems simply an excuse to get some of the UK's finest actors together for a Pinter-esque cuss-a-thon, and indeed, watching these thespic lions inflicting all manner of verbal and physical abuse upon one another is a delight. But the film exists as more than simply a filmed stage play, and deploys a number of cinematic devices to portray Colin's disassociation and potential annihilation. To be sure, debuting filmmaker Malcolm Venville has most of the heavy lifting done for him by the script and cast, but the film never takes the easy way out by descending into British gangster cliche, and Venville keeps the humanity of all of the film's characters front and center. Some have been disappointed by aspects of its story, but like its troubled protagonist, 44 INCH CHEST ultimately has nothing to prove to anyone, and is possessed of a morality that is ultimately bracing. Your proprietor regrets that he can not divulge what grabbed him so much about this film without spoiling major aspects of it, and thusly commends it to you unreservedly, saying no more.

BLACK SABBATH

A lone woman is terrorized in her apartment by increasingly disturbing phone calls. The caller is closer than she thinks.

A travelling nobleman is taken in by a family in a remote cottage, who find themselves under attack from supernatural forces.

And a nurse called to prepare a dead body steals a ring from the corpse, without heed to the considerable consequences.

Mario Bava's anthology horror film BLACK SABBATH adapts a trio of short stories (including Tolstoy's "The Wurdalak"), using devices from literature, theatre, and film. The stories play linearly, with each more suspenseful than the last. Each story unfolds at its own pace, but adds to the whole of the film. But despite the differences in scope of each tale, Bava employs similar visual strategies for each one, adding to the unity of the whole. All three stories are suffused with ominous purple backlighting. Doors and windows uniformly conceal something dreadful, but never for long - something or someone horrible peeks through a frame in each tale, and the sound of a creaking door is always bad news.



Horror icon Boris Karloff delivered several memorable performances in the twilight of his career, and in addition to appearing in the central tale here Bava deploys him as a playful narrator in the film's framing sequence. Karloff's iconic weight helps seal BLACK SABBATH's classic status, but he returns the favor by happily playing along with Bava's more freakish impulses. The downright Brechtian final shot features Karloff riding away into the night, and you can't help but laugh with him as the artifice of the film is slowly, hilariously revealed around him.

BLACK SABBATH is very much a 60s horror film, but I don't remember any other horror movie firing so assuredly on so many fronts. Its free-spirited, even genial qualities don't detract from its thrills (and some genuinely terrifying moments, particularly in the final episode), but instead add up to a unique experience, even in the varied history of the anthology film.

(This review created for the Final Girl Film Club, run as always by the talented and terrific Stacie Ponder.)

THE LATE SHIFT II

Though the devastation in Haiti remains the most important thing happening in the world, like many in America your proprietor has become absorbed in the drama unfolding late night on NBC.

I'm old enough to remember the bitter feud and controversy surrounding the first Late Shift, with David Letterman denied the Tonight Show, then accepting an offer from CBS for the rival time slot. A rich and fascinating conflict, with weirdly Shakespearean overtones.

But the conflict surrounding the ousting of Conan O'Brien from the Tonight Show, to be replaced by previous host Jay Leno, has become a full-tilt, five-act Elizabethan history play, with a larger cast of characters and set of subplots. Unfortunately for the powers that be at NBC, late night television has become a larger playing field in the years since LSI, with shows hosted by comedians who came up in the circuit that quickly shunned Leno. So we have Leno enjoying the privilege that he sold out for, being given five hours of prime-time after relinquishing his seat to O'Brien, and then being given the seat back by NBC execs. You have O'Brien getting screwed out of the Tonight Show (which, given its rich history and remaining reputation as a touchstone of television tradition, is a hell of a loss).

And crucially, you have a whole field of comedians with their own shows and time to fill on their own shows, and none of them are supporting Leno. Jimmy Kimmel did an entire show as Leno, spoofing his relentlessly middle-brow comedy. Leno even tried damage control and interviewed Kimmel on his own show, and Kimmel fucking slaughtered him. Letterman, naturally, hasn't remained quiet on the issue; Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have voiced their support for O'Brien and disdain for NBC. And somewhere around III, v, Craig Ferguson emphasized the gravity of the Haiti situation over the Late Shift (but found himself deep in act IV ad-libbing jabs at NBC).

Most importantly, O'Brien has found himself the subject of sympathy from celebrities and non-celebrities alike. Notwithstanding the fact that on Monday he'll be an unemployed millionaire (with fine prospects), he's become something of a mascot for recession-related unrest. After all, he's not the only one unemployed by or otherwise at the whim of executives trimming fat and dismissing employees who have suddenly become expendable.

O'Brien's final show is tonight on NBC. His mission statement for his final hours: "Let's have fun on television."

I worked at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a San Francisco arts center, for seven years, before being axed along with the chief curator (my boss) and ten others by a new executive director faced with a budget crisis (at least that was the excuse at the time). I spent my final weeks hanging out with Richard Stanley (whose brilliant DUST DEVIL screened at the Center), preparing my own solo performance, and bowling with my boss.

Part of what's making O'Brien's final shows so appealing is the recognition of my own angst inside his. At this moment he's the funniest and most-relatable person on television, for me and many others. Thousands of us only wish we could have played our final pre-unemployment hail-Mary out on national television, but there's a stronger subtext at play here, and I think it's why LSII is proving to have such a fascinating allure. And there's a lesson in it to be learned by our nation's executives. If the reputation of one of the last great holdouts of 20th century is going to be tarnished beyond repair, maybe it'll offer a beneficial lesson for the shaping of the 21st.

RED CLIFF

Pared down from two feature-length halves, the composite edition of RED CLIFF is 148 minutes, and something awesome happens in every one of them. Having pursued the project for many years, John Woo invests care in every scene, and the thing plays like a highlight reel containing all of his favorite tropes and motifs: you have a lone fighter squaring off against a platoon of oncoming bad guys with a child in his arms; you have a Mexican standoff (with swords instead of the usual .45s); and, of course, you have a superabundance of doves (particularly in a spectacular flying cam shot that Woo must have wanted to put in a movie for decades).

Adapted from the history and the folklore surrounding a famous battle toward the end of the Han Dynasty, the composite film doesn't feel like a compromise. The battle scenes are lengthy and downright awe-inspiring, but there's plenty of breathing space for Woo's talented cast to create vivid but quieter character moments, from Takeshi Kaneshiro's quiet scheming as consigliere Zhuge Liang to the perfect romantic equilibrium between Xiao Qiao (newcomer Chi-Ling Lin) and Zhou Yu (Tony Leung). The key love scene of the latter two perfectly meshes the romantic and martial themes that Woo has pursued across his career; if nothing else it delivers lines from Sun Tzu with a no doubt unprecedented passion.