Young Frankenstein (1974)

USA, 106 minutes

Director: Mel Brooks

Writers: Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks, Mary Shelley

Photography: Gerald Hirschfeld

Music: John Morris

Editor: John C. Howard

Cast: Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Madeline Kahn, Peter Boyle, Cloris Leachman, Teri Garr, Kenneth Mars, Gene Hackman, Richard Haydn, Mel Brooks, Danny Goldman

Young Frankenstein is so scrupulously faithful to the 1930s Universal franchise that it fairly fits itself into the canon itself. You must start with the 1931 Frankenstein and 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, of course. But then I say it’s your choice: the star-studded 1939 Son of Frankenstein (Boris Karloff! Bela Lugosi! Basil Rathbone!) or this affectionate send-up. It boasts a luminous black & white palette, old-fashioned wipes from one scene to the next, and arguably cowriter Gene Wilder’s greatest single performance. It comes with all the trimmings too, including the little girl, the bride, the blind man, pitchforks, torches, elaborate mechanical wind-up law enforcement out of Peter Sellers, and more.

Wilder is Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (pronounced fronk-un-steen in a running gag), grandson of the mad scientist Victor (renamed Henry in the old movies for some reason). Frederick is a professor of human anatomy and biology trying to live down his grandfather’s crimes, constantly needled by his students. Wilder, as ever, and perhaps more so here, is a paradox of style, a quiet-mannered player who uses off-beat pauses, the position of his head, and the volume of his speaking voice to convey great stores of molten angst, rage, and depression, which erupt in calibrated, pitch-perfect sobbing rants. The ongoing, never-ending, exhausting battle over the pronunciation of his name is just a foretaste of what’s to come with the driven, neurotic, obsessed fool Wilder has made of Dr. Frankenstein.

Smog, “Cold Blooded Old Times” (1999)

[listen up!]

Smog (not to be confused with Golden Smog) is basically one man named Bill Callahan, singer-songwriter resident of Austin, Texas, who has also recorded under his own name and, in some cases, such as this one, with a band. “Cold Blooded Old Times” hits first like an upbeat singalong, with a chorus large and in charge: “Cold blooded old times,” x3. The verses get down to the reality of things around here, which are not so upbeat. They seem to involve memories from childhood of an abusive and disintegrating marriage, memories that can “turn your bones to glass / ... And though you were / Just a little squirrel / You understood every word.” Some of the ways of expressing here are neither comforting nor very clear, notably the plaint: “How can I stand / And laugh with the man / Who redefined your body?” There’s a lot of things that could mean—the mind runs to all of them at once, the more you hear it, absorb it. None are good. But the song carries on over four minutes with its deceptive jaunty air, which includes submerged piano figures from Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” toward the end, absurdly calling things like “his hair was perfect!” to mind. The title phrase, “cold blooded old times,” cannot possibly mean anything good and the verses do what they need to tack that down. Yet the pleasure of singing with this song, learning its tricky small turns and getting them down, overcomes the dubious implications. Is there any right and wrong here? You can really belt this one with the singer if your voice is in good form and you have his key.

A Case of Conscience (1958)

This short novel by James Blish confirms a couple of things for me. First, I don’t really like religion getting mixed up with science fiction. “Few science fiction stories of the time attempted religious themes,” according to Wikipedia, “and still fewer did this with Catholicism.” That may be so, but The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (1996, so perhaps not “of the time”) and the 1959 A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. (which maybe I need to try again) both fit that bill too well. Second, my misgivings about fix-up novels—also called “mosaic” novels in an attempt to dignify them—proved out again. I did not notice this as a fix-up novel while reading it, but I did note a severe drop in quality after the first part, which was the original 1953 novella that won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 2004. The basic idea here is not bad. There’s a planet, Lithia, with an intelligent dominant reptile species. Four human scientists, including a Jesuit priest who is also a biologist, are visiting to determine whether it should be opened to human diplomacy. One of the four says no because it has a huge amount of materials that can be used to create weapons. The Lithian society appears to be harmonious and peaceful. But the priest keeps looking at it through his frame of religious ideas. He sees it as pre-Edenic, still innocent, with no fall from grace, and thus feels it should be respected as such and not interfered with. But then he decides it could be the work of “the Adversary” (i.e., Satan), offering a temptation to believe, or something. I thought it was muddled but I was already souring on it by then. The middle has a logic that is hard to follow. The ending is admittedly powerful, but I’m not sure I agree that the priest is a hero. So I had a hard time with this, my first time reading Blish. I’m open to reading more by him, just not necessarily the After Such Knowledge series, for which this is the first novel. A Case of Conscience won a Hugo for Blish but he is more famous (per Wikipedia) for a Cities in Flight series and for Star Trek novelizations he worked on with his wife, J.A. Lawrence. The biology in Conscience is often thoughtful and intriguing, but the physics is more lacking. Faster-than-light travel, for example, is just a thing that needs no explanation. I think that’s fairly common for a lot of 20th-century SF, but Blish absurdly ignores time dilation too. In a key scene near the end, in fact, our heroes are witnessing real-time developments on Lithia, which is 50 light-years away. It was distractingly hard to believe.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Live at the Apollo (1963)

[2010 review here]

I see via Wikipedia this is still considered one of the greatest live albums of all time. I don’t hear it that way—although I was more in thrall to it in 2010, I remember it still as one of my great disappointments when I finally got to it, finding it one day in the 1980s in a cutout bin. There’s definitely a “you had to be there” case to be made here, and I say that as someone who saw James Brown over 15 years later, in 1979, and count it as one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. It did not matter that Brown was actually on stage no more than 40 minutes. But the brevity of this album—31 and a half minutes all up—made me suspect at the time that I must have bought some defective product being moved through the cutout networks. But no, it’s actually little more than half an hour. There’s a long introduction and a few instrumental vamps between songs. Due to the excitement of the moment, I presume, most songs have rushed tempos and last little more than two minutes apiece, including a medley of eight songs that goes six minutes. “Lost Someone” kind of saves the set, with a groove that runs to more than 10 minutes, a harbinger of things to come beyond 1963. Brown would get pretty good with grooves that went 10 minutes or longer. I understand the historical importance here. The album sold like crazy and DJs reportedly played it like a double-sided 45, playing one side then flipping it and playing the other—in response to requests from listeners. Then there’s the weirdly haunting date of the show, October 24, 1962, at approximately the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when nuclear anxiety was reaching one of its highest and most intense points. I’ll tell you what: I like a book Douglas Wolk wrote about this album for the 33-1/3 series more than I like the album. And as fine as that book is, breaking down the show minute by minute, second by second, I like even more the later prizes of James Brown’s work and career (Roots of a Revolution, Foundations of Funk: A Brand New Bag, Make It Funky: The Big Payback, and the Star Time box). At this point, Live at the Apollo exists mostly as historical artifact with only modest levels of interest.

“The Man in the Black Suit” (1994)

I was excited to see a story by Stephen King in The Weird. I didn’t think editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer could leave him out but I guess I forgot about him by the time the chronologically ordered anthology got to Clive Barker in the ‘80s. This story is an interesting choice—a self-conscious reimagining by King of the kind of 19th-century American Puritan horror practiced by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving. The story takes place in the deep woods of New England where a boy has gone fishing. He encounters the figure in the title, who is there to steal his soul or some such. It’s all pretty traditional business in many ways. Not much is particularly original but some of the details are good. The man’s eyes are described as red and orange, for example, windows into his burning soul. The story was published originally in the New Yorker, which speaks to the status of King’s career in 1994. He would win some kind of lifetime honor from some reputable literary group circa 2002 or 2003, which I always think of as the moment when he was accepted and embraced by the literary mainstream. With this story from the New Yorker he was on his way to that fuller, wider recognition. It does feel like King might be trying a little too hard here. He comes by his New England bona fides honestly enough—born and raised there—but he has never felt remotely part of Puritan traditions. Well, maybe remotely. But his style is all 20th-century contemporary and his horror is catholic, my feeble pun indicating his stuff is all over the place in terms of its sources. The woods and soul-stealing do as well for King as sacred Indian burial grounds, cosmic horror, vampires, werewolves, and/or zombies. And more. The guy is so prolific he almost couldn’t help having tried everything by the mid-‘90s. I used to find him insanely readable and wish now I’d read more of him then. Or maybe I reached my point of exhaustion after a few thousand pages (still only a fraction, I know). At any rate, I respect what I understand he’s doing here—getting the Puritan phobias about woods and the devil into the mix. Hey, that’s horror pure as much as anything else, up to and including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Galaxie 500, “Tugboat” (1988)

[listen up!]

Even as metaphor I’m not sure at all what this song is about, so I take it at face value. The singer doesn’t want to be at your party, he doesn’t want to talk to your friends, he doesn’t want to vote for your president. He just wants to be your tugboat captain. It’s a place he’d like to be, x12. It’s a place he’d be happy, x4. The internet tells me it’s all a reference to the Velvet Underground’s guitarist, Sterling Morrison, who worked on and captained tugboats in Houston in the ‘70s and ‘80s, while studying for his PhD in medieval literature, specializing in the work of the 9th-century poet Cynewulf. Maybe—1988 was a certain peak time to glorify the VU. But now we have gone well afield of this mystifying and strangely alluring Galaxie 500 track. The singer’s words make little sense, but they flash with feeling. He really seems to mean it. Pressure from a souring relationship? That has usually been when I don’t want to be at their party, talk with their friends, vote for their president. At nearly four minutes “Tugboat” affords room for the meditative noise the Galaxie 500 trio specialized in. The second-half jam may be the part of the song to pay the most attention to. It’s certainly one to drift through. From a softly strummed acoustic guitar to the plaintive and beautiful notes picked out of an electric guitar and then the yelping, “Tugboat” sets out on the oceanic currents of its own creation. Dean Wareham’s lead guitar steps away from the melodic hook, withdrawing into its own thoughts as the volume level slowly rises and the mush of the gentle noise envelops us, with the moody singer’s quixotic declarations still ringing figuratively in our ears.

Black Mirror, s7 (2025)

It’s possible that Black Mirror creator, chief writer, and showrunner Charlie Brooker’s well is running dry, but I thought s7 was an improvement and even something of a return to form over s6, which leaned way too hard for me into easy horror. The show still feels a little tired, but priorities are back in order. The familiar sardonic view of corporate absolute control was sharp as ever in the first episode, “Common People.” It involves a miracle pharmaceutical that upgrades brain function against tumors and disease. The problem is that it’s expensive and only getting more so as tiered “membership” levels come available. To defray costs, lower-tier users serve as advertising media, involuntarily dropping product pitches into everyday random conversation, with predictably loony (and intense) results. Other episodes, creaking slightly as they may, take on the multidimensional lifestyle in a competitive work environment, immersive AI in a unique type of film restoration, and the usual world-ending levels of computer hackery. Perhaps the most interesting development here—perhaps a sign of where Brooker’s imagination is drifting—is a kind of sequel to the USS Callister storyline from s4. I say sequel, but the relation between them is more like the first was a pilot for a TV show and now this redux is the first episode of the first season. It’s a parody of Star Trek, a good one that rivals even Galaxy Quest, focused more on the original series (“TOS”) than The Next Generation or anything that followed. Jesse Plemons plays the Captain Kirk character—he is as interested as James T. Kirk in getting laid but a far more unbalanced and cruel person. In real life he is Robert Daly, a software developer and creator of a successful immersive space opera computer game. A DNA replicator enables him to bring coworkers into his private version of the game. At least a couple of familiar points are here. One is the little electronic nubbin you affix to your temple which enables so much technology in Black Mirror. The other is the idea that “digital cloning” brings an essential element of consciousness into the software and/or device or game. Digital clones are not just some kind of empty replicant but bear essential sentience and self-awareness in their own right. Both USS Callister scripts shade their characters to appear different from different angles. Daly at first appears to be a harmless dweeb, but when he keeps calling himself “a nice guy” in conversations with women we start to get the picture he’s more of a petulant incel. As the captain of a spaceship, he is a monster. But I suspect Brooker is having so much fun with his Star Trek universe that I wonder if he wouldn’t like to dedicate a whole season to boldly going around in it.

Lucking Out (2011)

The title of James Wolcott’s memoir suggests an unexpected quality of humility for a writer who is always interesting, entertaining, and smart, but also—decidedly—with smart-ass neener-neener tendencies. I loved his stuff in the Village Voice, Esquire, and wherever I found it, even when his beat was not a particular area of interest, such as broadcast television. But I had little idea of the full scope of his work and career. He came to the Voice on the recommendation of Norman Mailer, who liked a piece Wolcott wrote about him in Wolcott’s college paper in Maryland. Wolcott was 19, he dropped out of college to move to New York City, and he never looked back. He made friends with Pauline Kael, was perhaps the first writer to champion Patti Smith, haunted CBGB, monitored developments in porn and live sex (from a safe distance), became a student of ballet, and lived the 1970s NYC lifestyle, which meant thoughts (and experience) of street crime violence were never far. He scorns the new Disney-fied present-day Times Square, but allows that the old one was a scary place to be. He writes long twisting sentences that fill page-long paragraphs. Sometimes I got lost in the tangles, but I’ll put that on me, not him. He’s a great natural writer and a plain pleasure to read. I don’t always agree with him. He has no use for Joan Didion, but goes dewy-eyed over Kael more than once. I’m inclined to see it the other way. Wolcott has perhaps aged into a certain model of the egghead critic, preoccupied with culture as such, but that’s nothing to hold against a guy who can maintain high regard for both the Ramones and the New York City Ballet. I love that, and even more I love his witty, jazzing voice. Wolcott’s memoir is essential for anyone interested in New York in the ‘70s (the subtitle is My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in the Seventies) and it’s recommended generally for anyone into an absorbing read. I’m not sure if there’s beef between Wolcott and Voice rock critic Robert Christgau, but it feels like there might be. His passing treatment of Christgau (and Ellen Willis) is dryly hilarious, wielding a scalpel in multiple places.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (2019)

[2020 review here]

USA / UK / China, 161 minutes

Director/writer: Quentin Tarantino

Photography: Robert Richardson

Music: Quentin Tarantino’s streaming playlists

Editor: Fred Raskin

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Margaret Qualley, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Mike Moh, Al Pacino, Lena Dunham, Sydney Sweeney, Kurt Russell, Julia Butters, Rafal Zawierucha, Damian Lewis, Emile Hirsch

I admit I was hard on Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood a few years ago, director and writer Quentin Tarantino’s last feature to date. That’s now going on seven years, his longest gap between features. Previously it was the six years between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. He turned 60 in 2023 and the drift seems to be that he’s thinking of hanging it up, with possibly one more big one to go. Something about movie critics, the way I’ve heard it. Meanwhile, my write-up did nothing to warn people away. I have since seen Hollywood as high as #2 (after Pulp Fiction) on ranked lists of Tarantino’s pictures. For me, with perspective, the last picture he made that was close to exceeding its flaws was Death Proof. Everything from Inglourious Basterds on has represented increasingly diminishing rewards.

I suspect these are unpopular opinions, but I do think Death Proof is underrated. And that Hollywood is one of his worst, which was unfortunately confirmed for me with a recent second look. It’s better than I gave it credit for in 2020, sure—I was notably in a bad mood then for some reason—but that’s not saying much. It belongs with the second-half messes of Basterds, Django Unchained, and The Hateful Eight, as good, admittedly, as some of their parts can be. Hollywood wallows in a place familiar to Tarantino buffs, nostalgia for the bad movies pumped out then, circa 1969, which showed at B-movie palaces, drive-in theaters, and on TV. Hollywood is so full of clips it sometimes feels like we’re sitting around watching TV and mocking it in some dimly lit stoned haze with Tarantino himself.

Johnny “Guitar” Watson, “Space Guitar” (1954)

[listen up!]

The scene in Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox plays a high school prom in 1955 and stuns the crowd into baffled silence with a Van Halen type of fugue-state guitar solo has its origins in a way with this singular rave-up instrumental by Johnny “Guitar” Watson, later a disco man. “Space Guitar” seemed to come from nowhere in 1954 and it was promptly sent back there, never getting close to any charts. "This could break a few eardrums if it's played too loud,” said the now-famous befuddled Billboard review. “It's unusual, has a sound, and, in a way, it moves.” That’s one way to put it. Watson’s piercing, shredding guitar is on the attack from the jump here, spinning off into the outer space realms promised in the title, stalking the record with heavy reverb cutting in and out, lyrical talking-guitar passages, and a random quote from the well-known theme of the show Dragnet, because why not? Watson’s playing positively throbs and is mostly barely connected to the more conventional R&B band trying to keep up. The alto sax also gets the random reverb-on / reverb-off treatment from producer Ralph Bass but it’s not particularly in the same galaxy as Watson. “Space Guitar” may have sunk out of the market like the proverbial lead balloon, but it did not take long for such luminaries (per Wikipedia) as Bo Diddley, Ike Turner, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Frank Zappa to take notice, advancing the cause for a certain thundering liberation of the electric guitar. It should be noted that, as original as it all is, Watson hardly sprang out of nothing—Texas-born, he sought to emulate the showmanship of T-Bone Walker, perhaps the first to pick an electric guitar with his teeth. “Space Guitar” is now recognized for its wide influence, but it’s still somehow surprising to hear how positively crazy it sounds.