Category: News

Thrillers today are filled with fast cuts, pounding music, poor excuses for plotting and characterization, and seem designed to do nothing more than collect your cash and deliver the same old.  You usually see every twist and turn coming and are rarely surprised.

In 1959, Alfred Hitchcock, at the height of his moviemaking career, unleashed the ultimate thriller in North By Northwest. Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, Warner Home Video releases the Blu-ray edition on Tuesday and it’s a cause worth partaking in.

Students of Hitchcock see the familiar bits from the frosty blonde to the case of mistaken identity but here, he mixes them all together and adds in some fresh touches. Rewatching the film in its new, crisp edition, is revelatory. The opening scene establishes Roy Thornhill as a busy advertising man, a man used to dealing in artifice and then slowly strips away everything that is a comfort to him until he is on the run and forced, late in life, to grow up a bit.

Hitchcock and writer Ernest Lehman allow the story to leisurely unfold and the scenes play to maximize tension rather then smash cuts and edits to cover up poor storytelling. Grant’s Thornhill is urbane and witty, matched perfectly against James Mason’s Van Damm, a polite but cold enemy of the state. Their first scene is like a ballet, two opponents in a manor’s library, warily moving about, sizing one another up. Once Grant begins to run, the pace quickens – just a bit – and we go from New York to Chicago to South Dakota.

Along the way, he encounters Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) and their own dance is filled with delicious sexual tension.  When they begin to kiss and she looks away, you understand that there’s far more to her than we first believed.

We all know the crop duster chase in the open field or the climax at Mount Rushmore, but the film is filled with great moments, large and small. Lehman allows the characters to be individuals while Hitchcock tamps down the emotions so things never go over the top regardless of the seemingly preposterous storyline with Grant confused for an American spy and then ultimately used as a pawn in Leo G. Carroll’s game of chess against Mason.

The movie stands up to rewatching and the video and aural transfers are terrific.

The disc is contained in a book which has a 48-page look at the making of the film and credits. On the disc itself are two new featurettes: The Master’s Touch: Hitchcock’s Signature Style  and North by Northwest: One for the Ages. The former is a lengthy look at the director’s themes and filmmaking style intercutting an interview with the one-of-a-kind Englishman along with commentary from other filmmakers including Guillermo del Toro, Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin and Curtis Hanson.

The latter is a nice deconstruction of the film, much like a video book report for school with the above filmmakers chiming in as to the component parts that made the film special.

There are additional features lifted from previous editions and they include commentary from Ernest Lehman, a music only track version of the film, 2003’s TCM documentary Cary Grant: A Class Apart, Destination Hitchcock: The Making of North by Northwest hosted by Eva Marie Saint, Photo gallery and a gallery of Trailers.

All told, this is a marvelous package and one worth having for sheer entertainment value. Anyone who wants to tell tension-filled stories should own this for study.

Diana Laurence’s How to Catch and Keep a Vampire: A Step-By-Step Guide to Loving the Bad and the Beautiful
(Sellers Publishing, 10/23/09, $14.95 trade
paperback) is advertised as non-fiction and humor. It’s 160 pages, complete
with FAQs, myth busting, case studies, cutesiness with perhaps a nod to Sex and the City, references to the
latest vampire crazes (True Blood and
Twilight), and an underlying
cautionary tale (the danger of the serial-killer-turned-vamp-professor, Dr.
John Grey) of female stupidity, to-turn-or-not-to-turn angst between Diana and
her vamp paramour Connor, and redemption. It tries to be many things. 

I kept
wanting to like it. I love vamp lit. I’m published in the sub-genre several
times over and love to play in that playground. I’ve watched the suckers ever
since I was a little girl and first saw Bela Lugosi as The Count and said,
“Oooh! He’s cool! He wears capes and goes to the opera!” and lusted after
Frank Langella and loved Rice’s The
Vampire Lestat (and I’m an adult, so I despise Twilight – vampires don’t sparkle!) and can geeble with the best of
them over Vampire Bill and his delicious-but-inaccurate accent! So I get the
whole fascination-not-fear idea and how that can be played for amusement. We
are not amused.

Laurence’s vamps tend toward the True Blood variety, but with added bonuses. Yes, they drink real
blood and synthblood, but they can also eat and they have a drink called Light
Shade that enables them to walk in the sun plus an elixir that makes their pale
skin more normal looking. They aren’t damned, but are immortal (societal
prejudice smear campaign). Flying is merely hypnosis on their victims – they
don’t do it. They used to sleep in coffins out of superstition but don’t,
anymore. They don’t shape shift – more myth and hypnosis. The worst parts
about being a vamp seem to be that they can’t use mirrors and the alienation
they have from loved ones due to prejudice and the mere fact that the vamp will
live forever (barring staking) and other types of humans won’t (oh yeah,
they’re human…they have souls!). Oh, and if you drink a vamp’s blood but are
caught in time, you can be drained of all your now tainted blood, have it
replaced with synth blood ‘til they can get your proper blood type, and prevent
a turning before it’s acted upon all your blood cells and they’ve acted upon
the rest of the cells in your body. But it has to be done fast.

It’s all just a bit too neat and tidy and convenient
and…well…flat. It should be seductive, like its subject. It’s not. Dry. How
can you make talking about vampires, one of the most fun subjects in the world
(every culture has a type of vampire myth!), boring? This manages. Not quite
sure how. But it does. And that sucks. Excuse the bad pun. I just couldn’t
help myself.

Red Snow
By Susumu Katsumata
Drawn & Quarterly, October
2009, $24.95

From a Western perspective, it
would be understandable to assume “gekiga” meant “short, depressing Japanese comics
stories,” even if that’s not the most accurate definition. (Gekiga can also be long depressing Japanese comics stories, of course.) And, since
the current exemplar of gekiga for those of us in the English-speaking world is
Yoshihiro Tatsumi, there’s a sense that those short, depressing stories need to
be set in the modern world, that gekiga
is a literature of urban ennui and the
dislocations of modern capitalism.

But gekiga is wider than that; Katsumata is another one of its
masters, and his collection Red Snow is
filled entirely with stories of a rural, pre-war Japan – but one as filled with
bitter unhappiness and struggle as any badly-thrown-up Tokyo apartment building
of the ‘60s. His rural landscapes have nothing of nostalgia about them; these
are insular, stifling, dull little farming communities, full of equally dull
and small-minded people, out in the middle of nowhere.

A few of these stories have
supernatural elements, but the only creatures that appear are kappa – mischievous water spirits that fill the
role of leprechauns or pixies in Japanese folklore, and were thought of as
being equally as common and prosaic. The fantasy in Red Snow isn’t numinous or uplifting – it’s just yet
another annoyance in a small village full of them, just one more damn thing to
have to deal with. Kappa are no worse than the rich guy in town who thinks he
has the right to seduce any woman around – who’s also called “kappa.” (more…)

Beneath A Steel Sky: Remastered is a rerelease of the popular computer game from 1994 from British developer
Revolution Software. This month, Revolution brought it to the iPhone and iTouch, complete with new fully animated cut-scenes created by Watchmen and Martha Washington artist Dave Gibbons. Sales have already gone over 20,000, and the publisher expects to sell over 100,000 copies during the life of the game.

Which certainly gives more hope to that comics on iPhone idea…

First he appeared in Models, Inc. #1 last month, then he appeared on our own Crazy Sexy Geeks videocast, and now he’s appearing on The Late Late Show with Aquaman:

For that matter, later on in the show, host Craig Ferguson spent time talking with Sir Salman Rushdie talking about how he was approached to write a graphic novel, and then he veered into a discussion on kryptonite:

All right, so he got the details wrong. He has a Booker Prize and a knighthood, and you don’t.