Worst Family Vacation Ever?

Everyone has their favorite family vacation horror story but this one takes the prize. In Jeopardy (1953), Barry Sullivan and Barbara Stanwyck play a married couple traveling with their small son (Lee Aaker) along the Mexican coast. After scouting for an ideal location for their fishing trip, they set up camp near a deserted village. The little boy wastes no time exploring his surroundings and promptly gets stranded on a derelict pier. When his father attempts a rescue, he falls beneath the rotting timbers and is pinned in the sand. High tide is just a few hours away and so is certain death unless Stanwyck can find a rescue party for her husband. She races off in the family car to seek help and is apprehended by Ralph Meeker, an escaped convict who commandeers her vehicle with no interest in saving Stanwyck’s husband.

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The Poet of Chaos

People tend to forgive artistic geniuses for their human imperfections when their talent is so monumental – this could also apply to any super-celebrity with landmark achievements in any field from sports to politics to music – but at a certain point, there is a limit to what society will tolerate. The protagonist of Baal, a 1970 film adaptation of the Bertolt Brecht play, is the embodiment of this. A former office clerk turned itinerant poet and musician, Baal’s work propels him to the level of a literary icon, beloved by the intelligentsia and the common man. He could care less because he hates everything, including the society that helped shape his talent. More importantly, he hates himself and that self-destructive urge informs his every act, making him one of the most nihilistic and anti-social characters even conceived for the stage or screen.

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Frank Chandler’s Secret Identity

Now that Hollywood has settled into a regular routine of converting comic books and graphic novels into big screen blockbusters, it seems the time is right to revisit some of the earlier superheroes of American pop culture. Take, for example, Chandu the Magician. Based on the popular radio serial by Harry A. Earnshaw and Raymond R. Morgan and broadcast in fifteen minute episodes, the program ran from 1932 to 1936 and then was revived with new talent in 1948 and broadcast until 1950. What makes Chandu unique is the protagonist. Once known as Frank Chandler, he has spent three years among the yogis as a disciple, mastering the art of hypnosis and the occult arts, before being sent out into the world by his mentor to battle the forces of evil under his new identity, Chandu. His nemesis is Roxor, an evil madman intent on dominating the world after hijacking a death ray weapon created by Chandu’s brother-in-law Robert Regent, who is imprisoned by Roxor. When Regent refuses to divulge the secret of activating the death ray, his wife, daughter and son are also captured and threatened with death. Chandu is the only one who can save them.

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Things Come to a Boil

Satiric films about the world of advertising are always welcome and certainly necessary in a world where marketing of some kind is always assaulting the senses of potential consumers. Among some of my favorites in the genre from their respective eras are Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), Giants and Toys (1958) from Japan, Putney Swope (1969), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), the subversively comic documentary The Yes Men (2003), and Thank You for Smoking (2005). But undoubtedly one of the most cynical, biting and deranged of them all is How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989) in which the title can be taken quite literally. The protagonist of the movie, a self-assured marketing genius, sees his life and career usurped by a boil on his body that ends up replacing his own head and becomes an even more successful version of himself. What? Yes, you read that correctly.

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Avenging Apparitions

The Japanese film poster for THE GHOST OF YOTSUYA (1959), directed by Nobuo Nakagawa.

Based on a kabuki play written in 1825 by Nanboku Tsuruya, The Ghost of Yotsuya (Japanese Title: Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan) is one of the most popular and famous of all Japanese ghost stories. It has been filmed countless times over the years but Nobuo Nakagawa’s 1959 version of The Ghost of Yotsuya might be the definitive version. The story is one of fate, passion, betrayal and revenge – all classic themes of kabuki theatre and Greek tragedy.

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Free Spirits

Folco (Alain Emery) forms a bond with a wild stallion in the 1953 French adventure drama WHITE MANE.

When you consider movies made for children and/or family viewing, stories about horses constitute a large portion of the genre, especially in American cinema. My Friend Flicka (1943), Black Beauty (1947), The Story of Seabiscuit (1949), Snowfire (1957), The Sad Horse (1959) and The Black Stallion (1970) are just a few of the more famous titles and some of these have inspired remakes or sequels. Still, one of my favorite films in this category comes from France and is often overlooked today – Crin Blanc: Le Cheval Sauvage (English title: White Mane, 1953), written and directed by Albert Lamorisse (1922-1970).

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Beat Girls and Hep Cats

Among the numerous Hollywood films that attempted to explore the subculture of the emerging beatnik and bohemian scene of the late fifties, none is odder or more blatantly miscast than The Wild Party (1956) which casts Anthony Quinn as Tom Kupfen, a former star football player turned full time deadbeat, hanging out at basement jazz clubs and dive bars, looking for action. He’s joined by a motley crew of hipster accomplices that includes Kicks (Nehemiah Persoff), a jazz pianist of some talent, Honey (Kathryn Grant), a spaced-out former girlfriend, and Gage (Jay Robinson), a switchblade-toting psychopath.

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They Came from Tugador

The Yugoslavian film poster for the 1981 science fiction fantasy VISITORS FROM THE ARKANA GALAXY.

I always welcome the opportunity to learn new words and I discovered one today from an unlikely source – Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy (1981), a science fiction fantasy from Yugoslavia. In the movie, an aspiring writer questions a psychiatrist about the possibility of fictional characters from a story becoming real creations through the power of thought. The psychiatrist calls it Tellurgy – a non-existence word – but Tulpa is a noun that has the same meaning and refers to a being or object that is created in the imagination by visualization techniques. There have certainly been other movies to explore this phenomenon – Forbidden Planet (1956), Stranger Than Fiction (2006), Ruby Sparks (2019) – but Visitors of the Arkana Galaxy takes the concept in unexpected directions, employing genre parody, surrealism and a healthy dose of black comedy.

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You Can’t Go Home Again

In Italy and most of Europe Mario Martone is well known and highly regarded as a director, screenwriter and producer who first rose to prominence in the theater world. He formed Falso Movimento, his first theater company, in 1979 and made his debut as a director of operas in 1989 with the world premier of Lorenzo Ferrero’s Charlotte Corday. However, it was in the 1990s that Martone emerged as one of the leading film directors of the new wave of Neopolitan cinema that produced such major talents as Paolo Sorrentino and Toni Servillo. Martone is still relatively unknown in the U.S. but his 2022 feature Nostalgia garnered critical acclaim on the art house circuit and continued Martone’s fascination with the city of Naples, where he was born in 1959. Based on a novel by Ermanno Rea, the film is a slow burn character study of Felice Lasco, an expatriate living in Cairo, Egypt, who returns to his childhood home of Naples after a 40-year hiatus.

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Natural Wonders

Olden, Norway might not be a place you have ever heard of or know anything about but it is located in one of the most stunning and pristine natural settings on the planet. Situated at the mouth of the Oldeelva River and close to the Jostedal glacier, the largest inland glacier in Europe, the small village of less than 600 inhabitants is nonetheless a top travel destination for tourists who travel to Norway. It is also the childhood home of filmmaker Margreth Olin, who has made a film about it entitled Fedrelandet (English title: Songs of Earth, 2023) except it is no conventional documentary. Although it does showcase the awe-inspiring beauty of the region, it is much more intimate in scope since the emphasis is on Olin’s relationship with her parents and how growing up in Olden affected her feelings about nature and her place in the world.

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