Getting weird with the kids as we pick quarantine films

Plus we dig deep into Fango's online archive

Okay, so I missed Star Wars Day. Happy Revenge of the Sixth instead!

Is that a thing? That’s a thing, right? I do think it’s a little silly to make the 4th the Star Wars holiday this month instead of the anniversary of the original release of the film, but I think a lot of fandom is silly, so why be a Grinch about it? If it makes you happy, then May the 4th be with you, and so be it.

My boys are here this week, so we made sure we celebrated a little bit together by watching the final episode of The Clone Wars together, and I can’t get over how good these final four episodes were. As far as I’m concerned, Dave Filoni managed to reframe the entire story of the prequel trilogy, revealing the moral center of the story as a character who never actually appeared in the movies. Ahsoka Tano is one of my favorite things about Star Wars overall, out of the entire 40 years I’ve been a fan of this world, and I think Filoni had this remarkable opportunity to untie the storytelling knot that Lucas handed over with the prequels, and in doing so, he made them wonderful. Yeah, you heard me. You’re welcome to whatever feelings you have about the prequels, but when you look at the overall story that exists now, filled out so ably by the seven seasons of this show, it is a heartbreaking story about hubris and betrayal that lands with all the emotional weight that Lucas aimed for but could not accomplish with the films.

What I love most about the way things resolved is that it ultimately became the story of two apprentices who turn their backs on the Jedi for different reasons. One becomes the Dark Lord of the Sith, the literal embodiment of evil, while the other vanishes into the shadows of rebellion, nothing more than a rumor, more of a genuine moral hero than any of the Jedi “heroes” whose names were remembered. It is a show that points out how everyone failed in the prequels, and we watch the complete and utter victory of evil crush every bit of good that these people tried to do. It’s so different as an experience, and that shift in perspective is a real education in storytelling. My feelings about all of the events of the prequels are clarified enormously by these new stories, and I find the whole thing terribly, terribly sad now. There was a final scene in this final episode that carried more emotional heft for me than anything in The Rise of Skywalker, and I’m a little disturbed by that, but I also think maybe it’s perfect that this represents the last piece of George Lucas-related Star Wars we’re going to see. It’s not really about me anymore. My kids love the new films, and they’re the ones that Star Wars is for moving forward, and any time I hear adults griping and bellyaching and podcasting and crying about things they hate about Star Wars, it makes me very, very sad. Not in the good way, like The Clone Wars, but in the bad way, like man-babies who can’t come to terms with the idea that anything that continues to be produced for over 40 years is going to change and evolve and you are not going to like all of it, and more than that, no one gives a shit if you like all of it.

I don’t care much for the state of fandom, as you can see.

But, man, that last scene with [Redacted In Case You Haven’t Seen The Episode And You Plan To]. I mean, goddamn. Who cares about gripes from fandom when we’re getting work like that from people who obviously care as much as Filoni does?

THE MONDAY READ

Yeah, I know what day it is. Still.

Some of my favorite things to read these days are old issues of Fangoria magazine. I mean, I’m enjoying the new issues of Fangoria quite a bit and their website content as well, but one of the advantages of having an annual subscription to the magazine is access to the online digital archive they’re building of their old issues.

But who wants to read a magazine from 1980? I mean, magazines are disposable, right?

From the moment I stumbled across my first issue of Starlog, I was an obsessive magazine consumer, and my relationship with Fangoria was a difficult one. My parents were fairly liberal with what I could read, but Fangoria was different. It was the photos. If I’d wanted to read a book about Tom Savini’s work on Maniac that was just text, that would have been fine. But you add some of the most graphic images from that film in print form and it’s genuinely shocking. It’s shocking now. It’s not like my dad was overreacting when he would throw my Fangorias away. It’s just that he saw something very different in those pages than I did. He saw the violence. I saw the make-up. He saw these as reflections of real things, and I was looking at them as acts of make-believe. That distance between what we were seeing was insurmountable, and I found myself hiding my Fangorias. Over and over, they got thrown out, and I would track issues down again and rebuy them.

Having a digital archive that I can read now is a treat, and I think I’ve figured out my favorite thing about them. Many of the people involved in were deeply entrenched in the film community, and they were getting a terrific drip of information about films in development. If you go read the various things they wrote over the years about things that didn’t get made, it’s fascinating, and it’s not just based on fantasy like much of the shabby, phony rumor-mongering that goes on these days. There are plenty of things they talked about in the pages of Fango that never ended up happening, but those almosts and near-misses are fascinating to read about now. I go back and read that stuff and it’s a road map of the way the horror world worked at the time. You can see the ratings struggles, the career ups and downs, the rise of new companies, the collapse of other companies. It’s history, hidden in the margins of the magazine, and that isn’t remotely dated.

Their set visits are fascinating, too. They were given access modern publications would kill to have, and when I first started visiting sets, the reporting they did definitely influenced the way I would wander and poke around in various departments. Those days are over, and reading these issues, I wish I’d been working during this era. It would have been amazing to document these days, and I am so grateful that Fangoria was there and that they were as hungry as they were. You read those issues, and they are just bristling with energy. They love what they’re doing, and they’re determined to do it in their own way, on their own terms.

Seriously… they’re doing a freebie right now. Check it out. Their present-day writing is every bit as passionate and engaged, and one of the reasons I feel like the return of Fangoria is working so far is because they’re hungry again. Phil Nobile wants to turn out the very best Fangoria you’ve ever read, and he’s read every horror news outlet there is. He’s turned Fango’s digital presence into a canny curator of other horror outlets instead of trying to bulldoze the space, and the original content that they’re creating, whether on their rapidly-expanding and always-interesting podcast network or the articles that are exclusive online or the magazine itself, is challenging and provocative and genuinely loves horror.

Best part of the digital archive? No one can shred them and leave them on my bed for me to find. I can finally finish reading issue #7 after all these years.

GETTING WEIRD WITH THE BOYS

We’ve had a hell of a run of movies during quarantine. The boys aren’t here full-time, but when they are here, we typically average one movie per night, and we’ve tried to pick some really interesting stuff to keep the whole family engaged. The Godfather was a big hit, and then The Godfather Part II was an even bigger hit, with both of the boys struck by how sad the entire thing is. I think they expected something much more violent and action-oriented, and instead, they were left reeling by some of the emotional body-blows of the sequel.

We’ve watched some lighter fare. Superbad was a pretty resounding hit with both of them, and when I showed them that I have an actual McLovin driver’s license with my face on it from my time spent on the set of the film, they were convinced, if only for that split second, that I was not completely and permanently uncool. They’re hungry for ‘70s films, but they’re also interested in the strange and the silly from any era. On Sunday night, when they first got here, we put on Joe Vs The Volcano, a movie that I will happily rewatch almost any time, and one that I have put off showing them until they were old enough to hopefully tap into the film’s very particular vibe.

They seem to like weird and surreal comedy, and they seem eager to experiment, and in the case of John Patrick Shanley’s wonderful romantic fairy tale, they were certainly open to it, if puzzled at first. I think that’s a fair reaction. It’s not really like any other movie, and either you tune in to the movie’s wavelength or you don’t. When they started giggling at Mr. Waturi and his incessant “I know he can GET the job but can he DO the job,” I knew we were on the right track. It seemed like they enjoyed it even more the next day as it sank in. As the day rolled on and we talked that one over, they started debating titles for Monday night’s film, and they decided that they wanted something off the ‘70s playlist I put together for them in Plex. They were leaning towards something scary, and there was some conversation about Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Phantasm or The Omen, but we ended up landing on Dario Argento’s 1977 fever dream Suspiria, and man, that was a wild ride.

Toshi called me out for being a bad dad when he saw the MPAA rating on the film. “Wait… this is an X?!”

“It was in 1977. But honestly, that’s insane. This is less gory than a lot of the mainstream ‘80s horror you’ve seen.” Gore really isn’t what Suspiria’s all about, and before we began the film, I told them that they shouldn’t get hung up on plot or the way films typically work, that this was going to be more like a nightmare. Sometimes, that little bit of context can help, and it felt like Suspiria played really well. They both said they want to see it again theatrically, especially if the New Beverly plays Quentin Tarantino’s IB Tech print, which I’ve seen screened. That movie is meant to be played on a theater screen, and as loud as it can possibly be played. The screening where I fell in love with the movie, I got a terrible seat directly under a speaker and the film was cranked up to eleven, something which I felt like was a problem for the first five minutes or so, but which became a feature the longer the film played. You should feel like you’re being roughed up by Suspiria. It’s a crazy film. It’s a film that basically just yells at you for two hours, and I love it.

The best moment, I have to admit, involved the room full of barb wire. If you haven’t seen the film, whatever image that phrase evokes in your mind, the image in the film is probably worse. And weirder. And the way the two of them crawled up the walls of the TV room was one of those indelible horror movie memories I will treasure. If you haven’t read my long-form Film Nerd 2.0 piece about sharing horror with your kids, you really should pick it up from the Pulp & Popcorn Store. I love watching horror with them now that they’re old enough and they can tell me what they like and what kind of scares they actually enjoy.

For our final movie night this week, there was a challenge on the table. Tuesday morning, Allen walked into the room where I was working and said, “You’ve shown us two really weird movies in a row, and they’ve both been really good. You have to show us the weirdest movie ever tonight. So, no pressure.” And then he smiled as he walked out, that little monster. He knows exactly how seriously I take that kind of taunt, and I started thinking about it. Then Toshi complicated things by telling me he really wanted something from the ‘70s and something “hilarious.” So that put a lot of factors into play, and by the time we sat down together for the evening movie, it was clear there was only one choice.

Considering Monty Python and the Holy Grail is now on Toshi’s top ten list of all time, I think it’s safe to say it was a strong first screening. I ended up sore from laughing, and I’m glad I’ve let a good 15 years go by since my last screening. There were a number of films I set aside when the boys where born, knowing that I would want to someday watch them with the kids and also knowing that there is a limit to how many times I’ll sit through anything. It was a real treat watching the film on Blu-ray, and it’s funny how good it looks. My first viewing of Holy Grail was in the basement of my buddy’s house on a bootleg VHS, and the terrible quality of the picture was part of the experience. It was this weird low-fi thing that felt cobbled together by a bunch of lunatics. This Blu-ray is so nice it’s actually a little strange to look at for me. All the big stuff landed for the boys, but there was a strange side effect to the viewing I didn’t expect.

When I was very young, I read Mad magazine voraciously, and there were plenty of times I read one of their film or TV parodies before I saw the film or the TV show, or when they made jokes about pop culture in general. I tried to absorb all of that contextually, looking for the jokes beyond the parody. In the cases of many of those R-rated ‘70s films, it was years before I finally saw the actual films, and it was always weird to see how accurately those parodies had lodged in my memory. For an entire generation, The Simpsons has been this ravenous pop culture black hole, swallowing up movies and TV shows from every era and regurgitating them in parody and reference form. For my kids, meme culture in general serves this same function, and as we watched Holy Grail, there were many, many moments that one of them would proclaim, “That’s where that came from?!” about a joke or a line. Small wonder. Holy Grail has always been one of the most quotable film comedies, and those lines of dialogue have entered the lexicon, so there are people who use “And there was much rejoicing” or “It’s just a scratch” and who have never heard of Monty Python. They have no idea why those things are jokes. They just are. The boys were so entertained by it, and it was so much fun to see it through their eyes.

That’s the real value of any of this… passing it along. That’s what culture is. I care so little about stuff like the Oscars because those rankings are fleeting, momentary, marketing-driven, while the thing that ultimately keeps a film alive is one person sitting down with another person and showing that film to them. It’s a lifelong adventure I get to share with my kids and my girlfriend and my friends and my parents and in every case, when I share a film with someone, I genuinely hope it’s going to make them as happy as it makes me. I hope each time that it’s going to mean something to them, the same way it means something to me and that when they think of that film, they’ll think of me. There are movies that are bound to specific screenings for me, like that time sitting in my buddy’s basement, laughing at the crazy Swedish titles that go so far out of control at the start of the film, wondering what the hell I was getting into. I was 13 years old, and I’d never done a drug in my life, but I laughed so hard sitting in that basement that day that I was absolutely high as a kite by the time it was done. I remember the Black Knight scene destroying me. I remember laughing so hard at about 50 different things, whether it’s John Cleese killing his way through an entire wedding party or Terry Jones constantly adjusting Bedivere’s visor or the ridiculousness of all of the knights “dismounting” from their horses or the abrupt ending, and part of what makes film such a fascinating anchor point in time is the way my memory of sitting there next to my buddy, laughing my face off, is now tangled up in a memory of sitting in a room with my kids as they laughed their faces off.

We’re moving into a wonderful era of sharing stuff with them, and there’s a whole world of things they’re curious about that are going to drive exciting conversations and unforgettable evenings, and I’m greedy for all of it. Positively greedy for it.

AND FINALLY…

Sorry for the delay on this one. Even though we’re housebound, life finds a way to throw obstacles at you. Little ones, but enough to roadblock me for a few days. Part of what kept me hopping was trying to finish some things I’ve been working on for a while for you guys.

Also, we’re going to continue flashing back on some of the movie memories, both in theaters and because of my love of films, that have defined the 50 years I’ve been alive. Those updates are exclusively for subscribers, and there have been a few of them already. If you’re not subscribing yet, you really should be. It’s worth it.

I mean, I may be biased, but…

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Image courtesy of Disney+/Lucasfilm Ltd
Image courtesy of Seda Spettacoli
Image courtesy of SPHE