The Easter Sunday Intertitles: ………..”Mind” out!

Suitably festive — well, bear in mind that Jesus is still dead for another day, so we can do what we like.*

From Dwain Esper’s singularly strange NARCOTIC, which has a kind of narrative and technical incompetence perfectly pitched to actually create a sensation of disorientation and derangement in the viewer. By turns grimily depressing, startlingly hilarious, and just plain hideous, this squalid little number may actually be a work of some kind of anti-genius.

Even working out what’s meant by the above title cards, which appear at the film’s end, isn’t easy — they refer to an earlier epigram about the difficulty of dealing with psychological as well as physical addiction, but by the time they recur they’re hopelessly garbled — and why the quotation marks?

Still, this is all only modestly crazy compared to Esper’s mise en scene and montage, which often has a hall-of-mirrors effect on the awe-struck viewer: characters seem to multiply promiscuously about the screen, through the miracle of line-crossing, random changes of angle, and skewed eyelines. I would suggest showing this to dopers just to convince them they can get demented without resorting to any chemicals stronger than celluloid.

*Fiona disputes my theology here, which admittedly derives from old Punch & Judy plays, but I think I’m correct in saying that Jesus claimed to be one with his father, therefore God is Dead for a couple of days every year, allowing a short interval of spiritual anarchy. Watch the news and tell me I’m wrong. Tomorrow things will be back to normal.

Sweet Smell of Limerwrecks

More film-flam at Limerwrecks, reservoir of doggerel.

Some of the stars of THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS are given the rhyming treatment this time, here and here, and Thelma Ritter’s heroic turn in PICK-UP ON SOUTH STREET is memorialized here.

When Sam Fuller’s helming your noir,

The film is a battlefield – war!

He goes over the top

And still doesn’t stop

‘Cause he knows film is worth fighting for.

The Complete History of Kinema #3

Let’s see, well, we’re skipping golden age Hollywood, neo-realism and a few other things…

Interesting that George Stevens sued to try and prevent TV stations inserting ads into A PLACE IN THE SUN, and Otto Preminger sued to try and stop them cropping his films (which really do lose absolutely everything when viewed in the wrong ratio, almost uniquely in my view). I’d like to be able to say that Bert I. Gordon sued to prevent Elvira introducing his films, but that would be untrue, in a factual sense. But, in a deeper, poetic sense, very true indeed.