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Holiday Specials

2004 ALL HOLIDAY SEASON DVD GIFT LIST

By • Dec 25th, 2004 • Pages: 1 2 3 4 5

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BOOKS:

THE SCARECROW VIDEO MOVIE GUIDE
(Sasquatch Books – Seattle)

The Scarecrow Video Store began in 1988, in an out of the way neighborhood in Seattle, with just 619 movies. The owners were movie fanatics who liked the social experience of interacting with customers, and trying to locate the most arcane titles for them. Soon they were involved in film festivals, and brought such obscure cinema luminaries to town as Alejandro Jodorowsky and Nick Roeg. Their operation grew until the store became a kind of legend, visited by the likes of Tarantino, and finally led to the creation of this book, wherein, the authors explain, “The best thing to keep in mind about how to approach this guide is this: always keep in mind that you are browsing. Wherever you open this book, there you are.” And it’s true; I found it tricky to get used to, but rewarding once I got into the swing of it.

The reviews are informed and passionate. There is both a title index and a director index in back, so you aren’t left totally adrift. Just to see how they were doing, I checked their review of THE SUBSTITUTE. It’s in the Action, Adventure, War & Westerns section. And it goes like this: “In a fit of deranged brilliance, somebody decided to combine the white-teacher-makes-a-difference-in-inner-city-school genre with cheeseball action, and I’m so glad they did.” That was me, guys. I created THE SUBSTITUTE. And I was pleased to see someone not calling it the “aryan nation film of the year”, as it’s been dubbed elsewhere. I enjoy defending the film, but more than that I love reading someone who eats up good exploitation with the same spoon they dip into Antonioni and Leone.

The authors also maintain that in the final analysis nothing beats the experience of seeing a movie in a movie theater. About that, I have to disagree. Theaters have in recent decades become disappointing hovels, despite all the yowling about THX, etc., etc. People don’t respect the movie theater any more; talk is cheap, and that’s what they do while the film’s running. Candy is the big thing for the theater managers…sell, sell, sell, and image focus be damned. The platter system promotes a film running out of focus for two hours, added to which theaters are built nowadays with little care for optimal lens-to-screen distance. Just a month ago I attended a critic’s screening of THE AVIATOR in a posh NYC theater, huge screen, booming sound, but the lens wasn’t the right one for the throw, and the resulting image was grainy as hell, and that’s neither how it was intended to be ideally seen, nor how it will look on DVD. On DVD it will look grain-free and gorgeous.

Meantime, whether in a repertory theater or at home, The SCARECROW VIDEO MOVIE GUIDE is one of the reference books I would highly recommend.

XXX 30 PORN-STAR PORTRAITS
(Bullfinch Press – New York/Boston) Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. Hardcover. 144 pages.

This is the most provocative coffee table book of the year. I actually saw it for the first time in my doctor’s office, of all places. Porno stars are the subject, and the emphasis, in both male and female subjects, is ‘large’. Each star gets a double portrait, on facing pages, dressed and then undressed, in the same pose, beautifully lit, looking out at us challengingly.

It’s a brilliant concept, and is accompanied by short essays from the likes of Gore Vidal (‘Intro’), Salman Rushdie (‘The East is Blue’), John Malkovich (‘Discovering Porn’), Karen Finley (‘Make Porn Not War’) and Whitley Streiber (‘Alien Sex’).The porn stars include such heavyweights as Nina Hartley (she of the sex educational porns), Ron Jeremy (who appears everywhere, and certainly here), Christy Canyon (reminds me of Mimi Rogers’ daring nude scene in THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR), Aiden Shaw (who was reconstructed after a car accident, and whose photo is an implicit endorsement for whatever surgical procedures he underwent), and Jenna Jameson (she looks tough, but oh my…).

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