Watching films with Leonard Maltin and then my brother

I hadn’t expected to turn to Leonard Maltin’s 151 Best Films You’ve Never Seen Again so soon, but the films I had planned to watch one Saturday weren’t available (I forget why) so—

TUVALU (2000) is a German film done in the style of a silent comedy (and including very little dialog) wherein the protagonist struggles to keep his father’s bathhouse open despite increasingly broken equipment, a complete lack of customers, hostile safety inspectors and a deranged brother who wants to tear the whole thing down. Weird, whimsical and winning. “Technological system profit!”

AMERICAN DREAMZ (2006) stars Hugh Grant as a Simon Cowell-ish judge (“You make me want to be a better person — but I’m not a better person, I’m me.”) on a singing-contest TV show, blown away to realize contestant Mandy Moore is almost as rotten as he is (“I … I don’t loathe you.”). Meanwhile a terrorist who loves show tunes learns his mission if he decides to accept it is to win the contest so he can blow clueless president Dennis Quaid to bits (I’m so used to films mocking Bill Clinton that it took me a minute to realize Quaid had a Texas accent and was a Bush II sendup). Extremely funny though a flop at the box office — I wonder if (like Bringing Up Baby) the lack of any normies in the core cast is what tanked it or if it was the cheerful cynicism. With Willem Dafoe as Quaid’s puppet master, Jennifer Coolidge as Moore’s mom and Marcia Gay Harden as the first lady. “Iran and North Korea are not exactly like Dr. Octopus and Magneto.”

Now the stuff I watched with my brother — THE STATION AGENT (2003) stars a pre-Game of Thrones Peter Dinklage as a railroad buff who inherits an abandoned station house, moves in and prepares to become a bitter, anti-social recluse — only everyone from schoolkids to the local coffee-truck vendor nsists on trying to befriend him and dammit, he’s starting to feel like he wants friends. Particularly sexy librarian Michelle Williams … A textbook example of a quirky indie movie and a winning one; TYG and Craig both liked it. “Dwarves retire early. It’s a common fact.”

Peter Bogdanovich’s directorial debut, TARGETS (1968) would have been Boris Karloff’s brilliant farewell to the screen if he hadn’t gone on to make several dreadful Mexican horror movies after it. Karloff plays Byron Orlocks, legendary British horror star, but after making The Terror (the dreadful AIP Karloff movie preceding this one) he’s decided he’s done with acting — besides, what role has a bogeyman like himself in a world where the real horrors are endless wars, random shootings, racial violence and cancer-causing pollution (an argument I’d hear from reviewers and writers in the real world over the next decade at least).

As a young director (Bogdanovich) tries to convince Byron that no, the script for this next movie will be so much better, a young man gets together some guns and goes on a shooting spree killing as many people as possible (this was back in the days when that was shocking instead of routine). Hmm, could it be that the two figures of fear will end up on a collision course?

Bogdanovich says his directive from producer Roger Corman was to take some footage from The Terror, shoot more footage of Karloff, and shoot some footage of other people; his solution was to open with The Terror, then show Karloff horrified he’d sunk so low. The result is the scenes from The Terror became part of a good movie, which shouldn’t have been possible. Well worth seeing, particularly if you’re a Karloff fan. “If he’s so interested in the welfare of the people, tell him to stop making films!”

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