The Worst Ever

Have a Happy New Year!

I'm not working today, but I'll be back and better than ever (and slightly hung over) tomorrow.

Go 2009!

They Come in Threes

The actress Ann Savage passed away on Christmas. Like many other moviegoers, I know her from precisely one picture, the 1945 film noir Detour.

According to Ebert, Detour stars "a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer." Ann Savage was the sneering woman. Her real-life surname suits the character she plays, a particularly vicious femme fatale. Unlike Barbara Stanwyck or Rita Hayworth, she doesn't begin by batting her eyelashes; she's manifestly toxic and cruel from the start and, to any sane man, completely without allure.

But, in Detour, the hero is rather odd. Indeed, the movie itself is an oddity. It may be the worst great movie ever made -- it has bad performances, ham-fisted pulp dialogue, the lowest of production values, and a shaky narrative. It was shot in six days. It is relentlessly mopey. It looks lousy. It's about a hitchhiker on his way to California, but the cars all drive on the left side of the road. With the help of obvious stock footage, it barely stretches itself to feature-length running time.

Yet Detour is captivating. As if by accident, it stumbles upon some hidden reservoir of fear, shame, and hopelessness. In this miserable story of a masochistic wimp and the shrew who exploits him, we discover the lifeblood of film noir. So Detour, with all its flaws, is permanent.

In the same way, Ann Savage's performance is, too. In an era of cozy ingenues and dazzling seductresses, she's neither. Her sheer nastiness stands out.

Still Celebrating the Eagles' Victory

• Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li has a Japanese trailer. It looks slightly better than Jean-Claude Van Damme's version. So there's that.

• A man was shot for talking during a screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

• First Showing has the "19 Best Movies You Didn't See in 2008."

• Oprah really is a sucker for fake memoirs.

Too Much

There are about a million movies that I need to review (including Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, and Seven Pounds), but I haven't had a chance to do much around here. The holidays are crazy.

Do you know what's crazier? As a result of Oakland's unlikely triumph over Tampa Bay, Houston's victory over Chicago, and their own thrashing of Dallas, the Philadelphia Eagles have made the playoffs. I can't recall a more improbable good thing ever happening to one of my teams.

More Pinter Coverage

Three days after Harold Pinter's death, an enormous quantity of obituaries and appreciations have appeared in the press.

The Guardian has a fine overview of his life and work. The Independent discusses his love for cricket and his career in film. The Washington Post supplies a dutiful obituary (as does the Los Angeles Times) in addition to a personal appreciation or two, and TIME provides a surprisingly lengthy tribute. The New York Times offers a typically extensive piece.

Another Death

Eartha Kitt died on Christmas at age 81. I know her from Ernest Scared Stupid, Boomerang, The Emperor's New Groove, and TV's Batman, and I recall that Orson Welles thought she was the most exciting woman in the world. But like many people, I remember her most for her classic Christmas recording "Santa Baby," one of the small perfections of holiday music. It was part of a playlist that ran on an almost continuous loop at my house from Thanksgiving through December 25, and it happened to come onto the speakers only moments after I heard of her death. The song is more than half a century old, but it was difficult to think of its singer as a dead woman. There's too much glee, too much playful sensual pleasure in it.

The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and TIME have obituaries.

Harold Pinter Is Dead

I normally wouldn't bother to report any literary news on Christmas, but this is a special case. Harold Pinter, the great British playwright and screenwriter, died last night at age 78.

I'm sure many of the obituaries will concentrate on his recent political activism and, in the US, on the anti-American sentiments he expressed during the Bush administration. Others, I hope, will focus on his art, and I'll put up some links when I discover them.

Two of my more memorable nights at the theater were spent watching The Birthday Party in Princeton and, more recently, No Man's Land in London. Both were uniquely ominous, strangely funny, and slightly chilling. I'm familiar with some more of Pinter's early work through reading, but I know nothing of his dramaturgy beyond the the 1970s. I'd like to see more of his plays, and I hope some of his early movies -- Accident and The Caretaker, for example -- will become available on DVD.

In the meantime, I recommend The Go-Between, whose screenplay Pinter penned in 1970. And if any of his plays should be revived in the wake of his death, go see them.

On Your Mark, Get Set . . .

Once again, TBS is airing 24 hours of A Christmas Story. The marathon starts in five minutes.

Turn on the TV!

An Early Christmas Present

Since I have nothing to offer today, I thought I'd simply post a link to "Hans Dick #12," the funniest Flash Video I've ever encountered. I've wanted to share it since this blog began, but I never had a good reason to do so. It exists beyond the scope of this blog, which I didn't want to turn into channel for random, hilarious Internet gems. Other people are far better aggregators than I.

But it's nearly Christmas, and I thought I'd make an exception. Nearly all of my readers have already seen the cartoon, largely because our friend Manny insisted upon our watching it. But for those few of you who are unfamiliar, this is my early Christmas present. I should warn you beforehand that it may not become really funny until about the 50th viewing.

Enjoy.

Continue Wasting Your Life

• The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Guardian, and The Atlantic assess the Obama's inaugural poet, Elizabeth Alexander, and provide lengthy quotations from her work. I got a laugh out of this sentence from The Atlantic: "[Alexander's] work is inspirational in a way that the Great Gatsby, or Mad Men is inspirational, in that it just says so much about who we are." That's right -- the writer is comparing poetry to a TV show, and he means to compliment the poetry by doing so.

• Bright Lights After Dark points out that George Roy Hill's adaptation of Tennessee Williams's atypical, entertaining Period of Adjustment, unavailable on DVD, will air on TCM tomorrow at 10:30 a.m.

• I Watch Stuff has stumbled upon these 20 cool posters for The Spirit created by students at the European Institute of Design.