Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, USA, 115 minutes

Director: Steven Spielberg

Writers: Lawrence Kasdan, George Lucas, Philip Kaufman

Photography: Douglas Slocombe

Music: John Williams

Editors: Michael Kahn, George Lucas

Cast: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Ronald Lacey, Paul Freeman, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliott, Wolf Kahler, Anthony Higgins, Alfred Molina

As an inevitable fact of life, I've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark a few times (among other things, it's one everybody can watch at get-togethers) and have been toting around a VHS I don't remember acquiring. I have always resisted it a little and the nostalgic 1940s Saturday afternoon serial aesthetic it sports. The element is under willing influence of cowriter George Lucas, who in approximately 1981 could do no wrong. But ultimately Raiders has always struck me as too much about not enough. It's slapstick, it's swashbuckling, it has something for everyone. It's never dull so it is always dull.

I avoided it until it was two years old, at which point I learned a lesson I have had to learn again since, which is that director Steven Spielberg's movies should not be underestimated. They are so expertly made, tuned so uncannily to the audience, that I usually end up sucked into them even somewhat against my will. I ditched the VHS experience this time, opted to pay the $4 to stream it, and found myself greeted by one of the longest and most detailed disclaimer statements I think I've ever seen (and I look at horror movies on the semiregular): "Rated 16+: alcohol use, foul language, frightening scenes, sexual content, smoking, violence." I want to talk about at least a couple of these things—the drinking by Karen Allen's character Marion is insane—but let's start with the frightening scenes.

"At Chrighton Abbey" (1871)

This long story by the Victorian author Mary Elizabeth Braddon may be a bit of a dud in the payoff, but it's so much fun getting there I'm inclined to overlook the fizzle. Another story I know by her, "Good Lady Ducayne," a vampire story from much later in Braddon's career, has much the same strengths and weaknesses. There's a very strong pull to her tales from the start—she starts in laying on the class details in order to fix her characters in place. I suspect in general that she was a little disapproving of the supernatural. Both stories feature important characters who are notable skeptics, proved right in the vampire story. Here, not so much—our feet-on-the-ground hero, everyone's favorite beloved poor cousin Sarah, has a vision that must be taken as otherworldly (even as she resists it as such herself). So score one for the supernatural—a family curse that will not be denied—but I still get the sense Braddon disapproves. This is mostly a splendid Victorian Christmas story. The extended family gathers at the family estate, Chrighton Abbey, for all of the month of December and into the new year, which is how Christmas should be done. It's my favorite part of the story as long as the ghost bits are going to go bust. It's social manners with a keen eye. Cousin Sarah is dropping in for the first time in 12 years and everyone is so happy to see her. A marriage is in the offing between the Chrighton heir Edward and a proud young woman. As eldest son and chief heir, Edward is the target of the family curse, which is executed in the last third of the story. Sarah's vision foretells it too. There's another ghost story of about this vintage, John Berwick Harwood's anonymously published 1861 "Horror: A True Tale," in which the ghost goes corporeal and is seen actually wrestling in bed with the poor cousin hero—whoa! No such bolts of inspiration here (for that, see also F. Marion Crawford's 1885 "The Upper Berth"). There's not even really a ghost. Just a family curse that always seems to bear out. Even so, I like the style of the storytelling here, laying out the history of a great family and its estate and holdings and all the incidentals of how they live, for better or worse, with great problems and small. It's a terrific story of the holiday season, like the movie Fanny and Alexander, which also happens to be weak in the scary ghost story department. Apparently some of these people didn't get the memo from Andy Williams.

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"The Theatre" (1993)

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The lush, the gorgeous, the triumphant, the overdone "The Theatre" bursts with ideas and glory: musical, gestural, production, theatrical (no pun intended, at least not by me). It's fully glamorous and it's also a song about rich people stepping carefully over poor people. It's a high point of the album, though nearly too garish, too weird, too full of itself. It bears a well of molten anger that is deeply buried. It's melancholy, bittersweet—bitter. It's a Dickensian street scene in a theater district nearing show time, lighted wonders of the city after dark, I imagine the St. Petersburg theaters in winter. "The Theatre" sweeps in majestically with a whole battery of sound effects, a crying soul singer, laughing clowns and wheeling harlequins, a puffed-up keyboard-augmented orchestra. Somewhere you can hear the jugglers and the clowns when they all do tricks. It's like the late scenes in The Elephant Man, swirling into the magical other-world of the theater and its transports. But the other world of which the Pet Shop Boys sing appears to turn. It is seen from the view of the "bums you step over ... While you pretend not to notice / All the years we've been here." That is, the song notices not only the glowing electric displays of the theater marquees but also "Loan shark windows / Upon the pavement / Where you wave goodbye." (Or that's the way I hear it. The internet tells me it's "Below shop windows.") The scene is 19th century and Dickensian in its main strokes (though also 20th century and modern), with homeless teenagers lurking in the theater district, hoping for a little more porridge and/or tagging up the walls with graffiti, but more generally ignored at large. One production detail that always sticks with me is the way Sylvia Mason-James is submerged in the mix. She's singing her guts out in best Tina Turner fashion but is entirely subsumed under Neil Tennant's lead vocal and merely coequal to the sections with keyboards and orchestra, part of a three-ring circus providing atmosphere for the main show. At this point in the album, "The Theatre" is just another gaudy pleasure passing by, though one of the grandest floats of them all. Big song. Very big song.

The History of the Seattle Mariners (2020)

I will have some baggage to address involving this most peculiar and wonderful documentary, which I will get to as soon as I figure out how to describe what it is. It is over three and a half hours long and available on YouTube in six separate episodes or with all pasted together in one (recommended). It is closer to a 3D animated powerpoint presentation than what we think of as a documentary, with the visuals dominated by a calendar-page style chart of the years 1977 to 2019, which is filled in and cluttered up as we go with exciting photos, news headlines, and, most importantly, statistics. The statistics are there to be discovered. They are what make the hours of this documentary worth sitting for. They make the hours seem short. I suspect a job like this could be done with any team—that any professional sports franchise 25 years or older will have statistical freaks and jaw-dropping weirdness. But director/writers Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein have 100% made the case for the Mariners, who even statistically appear to be what they appear to be: a most peculiar study in unrelenting futility. Bois and Rubenstein, collectively known as Dorktown, work under the banner of SB Nation, a sports blogging network owned by Vox. As advertised, The History of the Seattle Mariners is a very thorough history, starting in 1932 and continuing with the Seattle Pilots episode, before literally charting Mariners history from 1977 on. I moved to Seattle in 1985 as an eager baseball fan ready to switch lifetime allegiances for the sake of witnessing a Gorman Thomas dinger in the Kingdome. As the years 1977 to 1988 are generally regarded as the tedious overture to the Mariners opera, I arrived just in time.

So to the baggage proper: 1) I have been actively turned off all professional sports by the response to the pandemic (start with hogging up too much of an already meager testing supply for the sake of meaningless exhibition games and continue a year and a half later with Aaron Rodgers). Don't even talk to me about college sports, which is a crime in progress on multiple levels, not just covid. 2) I have been actively turned off baseball since 1995, when players crossed the picket lines of others after their own strike was resolved even as owners turned to homerun derbies and other circus-like changes to the game to get butts back in seats, whistling and playing dumb about the complicated issue of PEDs. And 3) the Seattle Mariners. Where do you even start with this team? I can now say, thanks to this meticulously researched documentary, that the answer to that question is 1932. And I know better that the team has delivered more pleasure to me than I have generally been willing to admit. My favorite period is probably many people's, 1989 to 1995 (even if the last year was deeply soured by stadium politics). It was the coming of Ken Griffey Jr. and a bunch of Yankee-killers, which climaxed in a best-of-5 postseason series down two games to beat the Yankees in a freaking storybook finish.

I cried then and I cried again, watching the 1995 episode here, even though with mixed feelings still because of the stadium issue, a whole other story. Sticking to the main point, the underachieving powerhouse that was the Mariners for the rest of the '90s—with Griffey, DH Edgar Martinez, pitcher Randy Johnson (my favorite), and shortstop A-Rod—is well detailed here. They address disgruntled people like me at one point, with a weak argument that if all you want is a championship you're missing the point, but what I have learned about myself is I don't have such sisyphean levels of appetite for meaningless labor. The weakest part of this documentary is the portion devoted to the 21st century, starting with 2002. Yes, Ichiro Suzuki and Felix Martinez continue the amazing statistical march to pointlessness (and Adrian Beltre, and Robinson Cano), and in many interesting and dramatic ways. But what plays as tragedy first inevitably plays as farce in redux, and much of the last hour here is unnecessary, though still interesting in chatty distracted ways, for example, say, with the Jack Wilson story. Above all, on a personal level, The History of the Seattle Mariners renewed my appreciation for Griffey—I'd had a grudge against him since he left for Cincinnati, having always treated the Mariners as his quadruple-A steppingstone there. It wasn't really like that, I see here, and it reminded me of what it felt like to be a fan in 1989. Anyway, if a sports / baseball / Mariners curmudgeon such as myself can not just like this documentary but positively love it, there's hope for anyone with more moderated views. In short, don't miss it.

"Errand" (1987)

The last story in Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From collection—and possibly the last he wrote—is kind of a switch-up. It presents itself as the story of Anton Chekhov's death from tuberculosis in 1904 at the age of 44, perhaps anticipating his own imminent death at the age of 50. "Errand" appears to be factual but is not when read closely. The confusion is apparently deliberate because much of the story actually is factually accurate. Chekhov died in 1904, for example. I say it's obvious but it's not that obvious. Janet Malcolm has all the details in her book Reading Chekhov, pointing out how many of these confabulated details have seeped into other accounts of Chekhov's death, even formal biographies—the champagne, the layout of the room, observations of the physician and others who were there or might have been. Apparently a lot of people read this story and assumed Carver knew what he was talking about and these vivid but fictional details stuck with them. It's a shame in a way because it makes Carver look a little like a charlatan pulling it out of a hat. But no doubt it was intended as an homage and a secret desire (or not so secret) to be as great of a story writer. There's a scene within a memory of some seven years before the death, where Tolstoy visits Chekhov in the hospital and tells him he likes his stories more than his plays. Did that even "really" happen? I don't know. It feels like a dream but seems plausible, partly because I agree with Tolstoy in this anecdote. "Errand" never quite makes it to being typical Carver but comes closest after Chekhov dies, when the widow Olga Knipper is sending the bellboy for a mortician and giving him directions. In fact, it shifts into something else entirely toward the end, focusing on the bellboy and giving him some sort of epiphany around the champagne cork, which has fallen to the floor. The widow practically takes over narrative duties from that point in a strange kind of phantasm, seemingly from anxiety over whether the bellboy can carry out her complex and sensitive instructions. It's tantalizing to wonder whether "Errand" was the one-off it mostly appears to be, a strange meditation on death near his own end, or some new aspect to his work that would have seen further development.

Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From (Library of America)

A City Solitary (1985)

I came to this mass market paperback novel by Nicolas Freeling in an unusual way. In the '80s I subscribed to The Armchair Detective, the crime fiction zine, in its Otto Penzler era. At some point it called for volunteer reader reviewers, which I signed on for. I enjoyed getting a handful of free books in the mail, but they were not generally very good and immediately started cutting into precious reading time. Honestly, I don't know how book reviewers do it. Probably the most interesting thing I ever got was Rock Critic Murders by Jesse Sublett, which was not bad hardboiled detective stuff but not up to anything like what I hoped for from the title. And I could never get through A City Solitary until I force-marched it recently. It's short but it's ponderous and self-important. As messes go, it has interesting points, but the key word is still mess. It's basically a stream of consciousness exercise and not many people here are likable. The main guy identifies himself as the last of some aristocratic line. His thoughts roam through European literature for analogies and comparisons. He lives in the country in France. The novel starts with a home invasion. His wife is out and he's home alone. It's three young adults, two men and a woman. They steal some of his stuff—he doesn't have much of value—and also kill his dog. But instead of wanting to bring them to justice, he sympathizes with them, especially the leader, even wanting to protect them. It gets fairly complicated through the murk of the narrative, but finally our guy is on a road trip with the leader, our guy's wife, and his recent new lover. They are attempting to escape to Belgium or the Netherlands. It doesn't make a lot of sense, the pace is slow, and the digressions, often pointless, are continual. When I looked up Freeling's biography it made a little more sense. He wrote this in his 50s but his main thing was crime novels with a continuing detective character named Van der Valk (and another named Henri Castang). It feels like Freeling is just blowing off steam here, branching out with something experimental. Nice try, I guess, but it's just fatally indulgent. At least (and at last!) now I have read it, discharged my duty to The Armchair Detective, and can give it away.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Friendly Fa$cism (1991)

Consolidated was a two-man-plus-parts consortium, a white hip-hop act headed up by Adam Sherburne and Mark Pistel out of the Bay Area in the late '80s and early '90s. They conducted open-microphone message confrontation exercises in performance. They also wrote a bunch of good songs, preaching and all, and made a few great albums or parts of albums. Their messages tend toward eco-friendly warnings with a harsh edge of impatience for stupidity, focusing often on the political and economic arguments for veganism and animal rights. Friendly Fa$cism came to my attention when it was new, and I liked the follow-up album Play More Music almost as much. The in-your-face confrontation style, along with Consolidated's surprising musicality in the melodies, beats, and production and a general air of futile self-deprecating arrogance, often remind me of Frank Zappa. The album has hilarious episodes, as audience members at the live shows get the microphone to share views and make a lot of choice comments. Sometimes they nail Consolidated for various hypocrisies and stupidities of their own, but more often they are richly making fools of themselves. One woman attempts to quote the Bible at them, saying, "The Lord God said thou shalt have dominion over the animals of the earth, he didn't say say thou shalt have dominion over a big wad of tofu." Sherburne (or maybe Pistel?) comes back, "He also said the men shall have dominion over the women, so do you believe that, do you buy that line too?" A distant voice in the crowd: "You're goddamn right!" Sherburne: "Thank you brother, you're on the next record already." These breaks are lively and entertaining and often what people remember most from hearing the album. But Friendly Fa$cism is just full of great stuff, and don't let the titles fool you. These are great songs: "Unity of Oppression," "Typical Male," "The Sexual Politics of Meat," "White American Male '91 (The Truth Hurts) Part 2," and "Music Has No Meaning" among others in a long, solid album. "College Radio" is a terrific, caustic sendup of alt-rock at the very dawn of its brief commercial domination. The fact that Friendly Fa$cism mostly still sounds so fresh is paradoxically the most depressing thing about it. It was a little early for climate change, in 1991, but we can see most of Consolidated's issues are relevant to that discussion, such as wantonly cutting down forests in South America to create grazing land for beef cattle. As usual, the hippies and all their heirs are right about everything, and as usual they are ignored. What was an issue of economics in 1991 is an issue of existence on this planet in 2021, but the back and forth sounds exactly the same. Still, you can dance your rage to Friendly Fa$cism and sing along, if so inclined, and it's often funny in a miserabilism kind of way. Check it out.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

USA, 75 minutes

Director: James Whale

Writers: Mary Shelley, William Hurlbut, John L. Balderston, Josef Berne, Lawrence G. Blochman, Robert Florey, Philip MacDonald, Tom Reed, R.C. Sherriff, Edmund Pearson, Morton Covan

Photography: John J. Mescall

Music: Franz Waxman

Editor: Ted J. Kent

Cast: Elsa Lanchester, Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Ernest Thesiger, Valerie Hobson, Una O'Connor, E.E. Clive, Dwight Frye, O.P. Heggie, Gavin Gordon, Douglas Walton, Walter Brennan, John Carradine

Bride of Frankenstein is old enough that we are still seeing experimental ways of making and marketing movies. Boris Karloff is credited as "Karloff," which seems mindful of the way sophisticated French film stars of the time such as Arletty literally made glamorous names for themselves. Elsa Lanchester never properly gets credit for playing the Bride, only for playing Mary Shelley in the odd frame story. Bride of Frankenstein is also a sequel, a follow-up to the original 1931 Frankenstein, which was as much a sensation as any of the theater productions that preceded it by well over a century. We used to love this story. Bride of Frankenstein is more fun than the 1931 original. Technology had visibly improved even across four years, and the idea of making a movie that is basically "I'd like some more of that please" in regard to another popular movie might have still seemed novel. Some like to call this the greatest sequel ever made, or one of them, and I'm not inclined to disagree.

The movie is remarkably short but remarkably packed full of unique scenes swirling around the Frankenstein mythos. The frame story depicts another storm-driven night, like the famous one in Geneva that produced Shelley's Frankenstein novel and John William Polidori's story "The Vampyre." Lord Bryon (Gavin Gordon) struts around and acts decadent, handing us the "previously on" recap while Percy simpers. Mary says she has more to tell them about "Henry" Frankenstein's miserable experiments. They gather close. Dissolve to the chaotic scenes of the end of the first movie, where the monster has presumably been destroyed with the burning windmill in which he was trapped and the villagers are relieved and happy again.

"The Phantom Coach" (1864)

This story by Amelia B. Edwards is plain old-fashioned ghost-storytelling and a clinic in one way to do it. There's a hunter, the first-person narrator, traipsing the moors by himself for game. He's on a long honeymoon or independently wealthy. His new wife is at home and he loves her dearly. He has spent the day hunting, but now darkness is falling and he is lost. He is sad that his wife will be worried about him. It's set in December (all the good ones are in December, aren't they?) but that's as close to Christmas as it gets beyond a lovely snowfall. He must seek shelter for the night. He finds himself in the isolated home of a sort of British Voltaire figure, an intellectual renaissance man of letters and science, with a telescope, a microscope, and books stacked everywhere in his study. At first, finding himself 20 miles from home, the hunter intends staying overnight, but when the snow lets up and his host tells him there's a way home to his wife (his motivation to return to her is believable, not weird, and one of the most grounding details here), he jumps at it. It involves walking to a point where he can meet up with a night mail coach. On the way there he learns of a terrible accident involving this coach. It's a little late and a little clumsy on the foreshadowing, but all right. Edwards has spun her web and we are well caught up in it by now. When the coach shows up, sure enough, it's full of ghosts, presumably from the accident. It's mechanical in some ways, but what Edwards is good at is the extraordinary experience itself—the way the ghosts look and behave (and smell), the way the hunter responds, unknowing at first. "The icy coldness of the night air had struck a chill to my very marrow, and the strange smell inside the coach was affecting me with an intolerable nausea." The bad smell and some details about their appearance make it clear these ghosts are more like decomposing bodies than immaterial mist. The coach itself, on closer inspection, is about in the same condition as Miss Havisham's wedding dress. When the hunter comments on its deplorable state one of the ghosts is annoyed. "His eyes glowed with a fiery unnatural luster. His face was livid as the face of a corpse. His bloodless lips were drawn back as if in the agony of death, and showed the gleaming teeth between." It only gets worse and then there's a calamity, the accident of the coach, but the narrator survives. He swears the whole thing is true but the doctor thinks he's cracked. At least he's back with his dear wife again. The clarity of some of these older stories can just be remarkable. They effectively describe an uncanny vision of horror, and we're all good. That's enough.

65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Mary Danby
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Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (2020)

I was drawn to this movie randomly by the title, thinking it might be a documentary about the competition. That's how I seem to be doing it these days, floating around the internet. Once I got to it I saw right away it's a Will Ferrell movie but by then I had the momentum. Full disclosure, I have not seen many Will Ferrell movies. I know he can be funny—I laughed at some of his antics here, for example—but he has always struck me as an unlikely comic figure. He's not funny so much as he is warm and almost wholesome in his basic ineptitude. Elf could well be his peak. Here he plays Lars Erickssong. a ne'er-do-well middle-aged man, still living at home, whose only dream is to compete and win in the Eurovision contest like his lifelong idols ABBA. The picture is set in Iceland and full of gorgeous location shots, slippery Nordic accents from the cast, and lots of Viking jokes. Rachel McAdams plays Sigrit Ericksdottir, who may or may not be the daughter of Erick Erickssong (Pierce Brosnan), the town lothario and father of many, including Lars. Thus there is a really funny (by which I mean not funny at all) running joke that Lars and Sigrit are half-siblings and incestual. I haven't seen much of McAdams either but I liked her in Mean Girls 17 years ago. It's all pleasantly mindless watching. For the most part the picture is making fun of Eurovision, which is not hard to do, but they are not entirely immune to the charms of eurotrash dance music either, and some of that comes through—not enough. The story beats are familiar. Either they're going to be unlikely winners of the competition or they're going to come close. That's not really a spoiler because even though it's predictable enough in all the big ways, down at the level of the narrative Eurovision Song Contest zigs and zags and has some surprises. My favorite parts, and there weren't nearly enough of them for a movie with this title, were the musical acts, all cheese, colored lights, synthy keyboards, and pouting expressions. I know there's no accounting for taste. I could never watch more than five minutes at a time of American Idol but I'm still inclined to put the time in on as much euro-disco as I can handle, which might be a lot. However, it looks like I also might have to put effort into hunting down some of the documents. In fact, I see there's one from 2002, Estonia Dreams of Eurovision!, that looks like it might have been the model for this Will Farrell vehicle, which: approach with caution.

The Professor and the Prostitute (1986)

Note the subtitle, And Other True Tales of Murder and Madness, as this is a collection of nine short true-crime pieces by Linda Wolfe. She notes here that her specific interest in crime focuses on the middle class. I was disappointed at first that the book is smaller pieces, but they turned out to be very good—interesting cases, and interesting journalistic ways of chasing down the stories. She talks to lots of people, but she's also thoughtful and informed when she probes into the psychological aspects. I found out about it originally from Bill James's book on true-crime literature, Popular Crime (basically worth reading itself). These pieces reminded me how good those Year's Best annuals on true-crime used to be, for as long as they went in the 2000s. The title piece here is the longest. The most interesting to me now was a case that involved twin gynecologists who both died at age 45 in strange circumstances. The case served as an obvious inspiration for director and writer David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers movie from 1988 with Jeremy Irons playing both twins. The real-life version did not invent strange and disturbing gynecology tools like in the movie, but they were similarly innovative researchers who had some reputation before going weird. An amazing amount of the movie comes right from the case, which makes the case even more creepy. Wolfe, who died in 2020 at 87, had a good nose for true-crime cases that can haunt—maybe because she does keep the focus on the middle class, which makes them familiar to me in subtly uncanny ways. My copy is a lurid mass market paperback from the mid-'80s, part of my intermittent downsizing project. I felt a little trashy seeing it laying around but I liked it in some nostalgic way for that reason too. Wolfe was more self-deprecating than warranted in her introduction and throughout. I liked her straightforward way of getting at these cases. She has a lot of insight into the people and the incidents and how they all add up. A lot of books look like this one, but not many of them are this good. It was over too soon. I wanted more.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Mothman Prophecies (1975)

Life at home: As my never-ending project of downsizing continues, my eye often lingers long and cold on cruddy old mass market paperbacks. I've got a handful or so that fell into the bin of "read before probably tossing" and here is the first. I read and enjoyed ufologist John A. Keel in the '70s, notably Operation Trojan Horse, but wasn't sure at all how I would feel about him now. But I enjoyed The Mothman Prophecies much more than I thought I would. The whole Mothman thing, I admit, has never meant much to me but I have known people who are into it. I didn't think the 2002 movie that gave this book a second life had much going for it. And I see a fair amount of grumbling around the internet that the book is disjointed, aimless, and obscure. It is all that, although at least it sticks to a timeline. But it's really all over the place—for one thing, is Keel a skeptic or a believer? He's trying to have it both ways. It's all anecdotes, as opposed to scientific or even methodical. But what anecdotes! It took me a while to figure out (as Amazon reviewers and many others have noted before me) that Keel is actually a pretty good paranoid horror story writer, working sneaky special effects, including the now famous "men in black," along with phones on the fritz and strained synchronicity, e.g., was I making too much of a coincidence? Yes, probably, we can only answer, but please continue. Basically, the book details scenes and incidents around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, from November 1966 to December 1967. So many UFOs you think they should have sold concessions. Then this man-shaped man-sized flying thing, like something out of a Ray Bradbury story, and the sightings thereof. The climax is a spectacular failure of infrastructure—a fairly famous disaster, as these things go—in the collapse of the Silver Bridge at rush hour during Christmas season. Wikipedia has the death toll at 46. Mothman and UFO sightings dried up after that, followed by Robert Stack, ominous organ chords, and a commercial break. This book is like a grand expiation of some kind, sold in drugstores. Keel comes across a little like one of H.P. Lovecraft's preoccupied investigators, or maybe just a nutty Bircher, especially when he is harassed by unseen but powerful forces. Not the phone ringing again! Men in black have been a joke since the movie franchise, but they work for me here. Keel is at pains to make clear they are not likely government men. They are the aliens, whatever the aliens are. The Mothman Prophecies is a lot of fun, complete with thrills and chills. Just don't ask me whether it is nonfiction.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

L'Age d'Or (1930)

The Golden Age, France, 63 minutes

Director / editor: Luis Buñuel

Writers: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, Marquis de Sade

Photography: Albert Duverger

Music: Luis Buñuel, Georges Van Parys

Cast: Gaston Modot, Lya Lis, Caridad de Laberdesque, Max Ernst, Lionel Salem, Germaine Noizet, Bonaventura Ibanez, Luis Buñuel

Surrealism means never having to say you're sorry, as director, cowriter, and editor Luis Buñuel seeks to show in his 1930 follow-up to the ragingly weird Un Chien Andalou. That short picture remains famous for an eyeball shot that will probably always work for as long as people look at movies. L'Age d'Or does not have anything nearly as memorable—very few movies do, actually—but Buñuel appears to have more confidence about what he is doing as a filmmaker. There's more juice to this one. He is once again working with Salvador Dali and in 1930 you couldn't get much more outré than that, or at least Parisian. Max Ernst is along for the ride as well in a small part.

L'Age d'Or, for one thing, has a much more detectable through-line. There's this couple, see—well, I can't tell you a lot more than that. Gaston Modot is billed as "The Man," Lya Lis as "The Woman." They're in a lot of scenes, together and separately. I didn't say it made sense, I said the movie has a more detectable through-line. Buñuel's loathing of the Catholic Church is often front and center. Pontiffs in full garb and later their skeletons are seen early. And there's something about Rome—stock aerial shots of the city, some locations on the ground. A clip from a documentary about scorpions starts it off. A cow is found in a very nice bed. A horse-drawn cart passes through a fancy indoor social gathering.

"The Festival" (1925)

Here is one of the many H.P. Lovecraft stories that did not make it into the skimpy Library of America collection edited by Peter Straub. In fairness, in most cases it's not hard to guess the reasons for exclusion—but, on the other hand, that collection had room for hundreds more pages and LOA projects devoted to an author generally bear some suggestion of completeness. A lot of stories were left out of that one. They could have been put in their own "approach with caution" section. So, right, not much happens in "The Festival." It's mostly Lovecraft laying an eldritch mood on thick. But making it a Christmas story redeems a lot of the inert qualities for me—or "the Yuletide," as our unnamed first-person narrator prefers to call it. He is obviously aware of the holiday's ancient pagan winter solstice origins. He is visiting the town of Kingsport for the holiday. He appears to have kin there who appear to know him. Or who anyway welcome him and bring him along to the festival. It's possible he is dead. The festival is held in a kind of cave next to an underground river reached by a stairway descending from a church basement. The church sits on top of a hill. There is a nice dream quality here as events unfold, an effect often sought by Lovecraft but less often achieved. This feels like a dream because it's in that realm where it almost makes sense, with careful use of details. The utter silence, for example—of the town, of the crowd of people shuffling to the festival, of the festival itself—is positively eerie and notably "off." Lovecraft had some mystical experience the first time he visited the Massachusetts town of Marblehead, the model for Kingsport. It gets mentioned a lot in relation to this story but I file it under Lovecraft's excitable temperament. ISFDB classes it as a Cthulhu story. The Necronomicon book is in it. The narrator's relative, "the old man," is a good character—he wears a subtle mask which is hard to notice at first and makes his facial features immobile. So lots of good stuff here but no real story—various horrors and grotesqueries of the scene at the festival proper, then over and out. That's not necessarily a bad thing when I think of the contrived getaway capers that mar some of his best stories, like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" or At the Mountains of Madness. Still, a dreamy march to a mysterious subterranean chamber and some grotesqueries don't feel like quite enough either, hence perhaps the reason it was left out of the LOA (S.T. Joshi did include it in his Penguin collection of Lovecraft). I like "The Festival" because it's a Christmas story after all, and I believe it is Lovecraft's only one. He always was a great one for respecting tradition.

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