Jules Dassin/Night and the City

I interviewed Jules Dassin, still dapper and articulate, in the mid 1990s and brought along a vintage paperback copy of Night and the City, hoping I'd have the nerve to ask him to sign it. Fortunately, we got along like a house afire: Though I was much younger than he was, we both grew up in a New York that bore little resemblance to the new, improved version. So at the end of the interview I bit the bullet and handed him the movie tie-in paperback and asked.

He looked at it intently for a moment and then said, "Would you mind

if I wrote my name across Gene Tierney's creamy bosom?" And he did.

The revolution will not be televised...

Musician, poet and social activist Gil Scott-Heron died on May 27th, and while reading his obit I got hit with one of those "how'd I get that so wrong" broadsides.

I always took the signature line from Scott-Heron's 1970 spoken-word screed (contrary to what every over-stressed, culturally under-educated online writer seems to have taken at face value because someone once wrote it somewhere, Scott-Heron's legacy isn't rap -- it's the apparently spontaneous but meticulously-crafted verse of poetry slams)"The Revolution Will Not be Televised” as a defiant warning that when the poor, alienated and disenfranchised finally get up off their asses to fight the power, the carnage will be overwhelming, up against the wall motherfucker real, not some happy news kicker or an intensely manipulated, reality-tv style spectacle. Talk about prescient.

Interestingly, my husband's take was the complete opposite: He interpreted it to mean that the ruling class would suppress real reporting and spin the whole thing into insignificance… also prescient.

But I'd never listened to or read the full piece (shame on me) and it was a revelation. Yes, Scott-Heron addresses racism, police brutality, addiction and entrenched social injustice. But this excerpt sums up what really burned his ass:

“The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox in four parts without commercial interruptions…

"The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theater and will not star Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle as Julia.

"The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.

"The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.

"The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, brother."

Damn – that is more prescient than I ever imagined.

http://youtu.be/qGaoXAwl9kw

Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds named a 2010 best non-fiction title!

Thank you Google Alerts! Without you I would never had known that PopMatters just named the revised and updated edition of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento (University of Minnesota Press) one of the best non-fiction books of 2010.

Sneaky movie cameos by musicians... did you spot them?

I'm not talking about Keith Richard as Captain Jack Sparrow's dad (duh) in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End or Alanis Morrisette as one attitudinal God Almighty in Kevin Smith's Dogma — everyone knew about those long before the movies opened.

And I'm not talking about bands or soloists appearing as themselves in a performance context, so Bauhaus-era Peter Murphy doing "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in The Hunger is a no go.

But Iggy Pop in a ladies' dress and sunbonnet, talking all holy while fingering Johnny Depp's soft, pretty hair in Jim Jarmusch's existential western Dead Man? That one took me by surprise. So did Miles Davis is Scrooged; what the.......?

You can see all ten by clicking here.

...and a big hand for Sharktopus

So, you thought Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus reset the exploitation bar... oh, ye of little imagination! Prepare to feel the earth shift beneath your feet again, because Sharktopus is here. I live for press releases that read like Onion parodies.

Less than a year after receiving an honorary Oscar for inundating 1950s movie theaters with teen-friendly monster movies, biker flicks, rock ‘n’ roll showcases and WIP pictures, along with helping launch the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante, James Cameron, Bruce Dern, Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, Sylvester Stallone, Monty Hellman, Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Paul Bartel, Curtis Hanson, Gale Anne Hurd, Alan Arkush, William Shatner, Penelope Spheeris, Curtis Harrington and Peter Fonda, and barely a month after Alexandre Aja’s 3D remake of Piranha opened, 84-year-old exploitation legend Roger Corman proved he’s still in the game with the too-shameless-to-be-believed Sharktopus.

Yes, the hybrid-horror effort, which follows in the drag marks of such recent Corman-produced projects as Dinoshark, Supergator and Dinoshark vs. Supergator debuted on the SyFy channel, but that’s the name of the game these days: The age of theatrical openings for, say, a mutant rapist fishmen movie like 1980’s Humanoids from the Deep is long gone.

But the likes of Sharktopus keep up-and-comers and downward dogs (I leave it to you to fill in the names) in mortgage payments and help feed memories of exploitation pictures past.

And dig that crazy theme song by the Cheetah Whores! Thank you, SyFy and Anchor Bay.

Sharktopus is available on DVD and Blu-ray (like I care) on March 15th… start planning your alcohol-fueled viewing party now.