Joe Dante

[ford]

Also, Twin Peaks is too insistent in locating the rot in the heart of the nuclear family to ever be nostalgic for that 50s American ideal. It's a show where the clean cut, fresh-faced popular crowd are the drug dealers and monsters, while the bikers for instance are sensitive and upright. That's also why all the kitschy Americana in the show (and Lynch's films) feels so surreal and fantastic: it's not an actual social ideal, so it holds no social or historical weight. Anyone who'd read Lynch's work as nostalgic or backward looking are badly misreading him.

Oh, I think he's definitely nostalgic for the early postwar era! No question about it. The music, films, etc were clearly of great inspiration to him, every bit as much as Francis Bacon. And, yes, the idea of Americana innocence under threat -- Twin Peaks season 3 is essentially a long rant about its total collapse. Ever seen that video where he drives around LA ranting about graffiti?

There is enormous question about it. The opening scene of Blue Velvet says it all: an impossibly magical 50s American landscape of happiness and innocence hiding horror and perversity right inside of it. Not being invade by it. Housing it, masking it, hiding it from view. A preppy, wholesome, babyfaced golden child discovering an abyss of sexual perversity latent inside him; a 50s beauty, all charm and grace, powerless to stop herself from enjoying her own abuse; a gang of sadists and criminals, all of whom are drenched in 50s culture, who exemplify it more than any other character to the point of being played by actors from that era. Or Twin Peaks, where the villains are not modernity but powerful men like fathers and Reagan-ite business men; where wholesome exteriors hide horrible secrets.

Not one single Lynch movie or tv series is set in the 1950s. His kitschy Americana is never granted any social weight--it's mainly iconography. If Lynch is nostalgic, he may well be nostalgic for the products of the 50s, like the music or the movies or the fashion. But he does not mistake that for a nostalgia for 50s American society. Hence how many of his movies locate evil within 50s Americana; how indifferent or outright critical they are towards central 50s institutions.

I think that's right. But only to an extent: the FBI is certainly a 1950s institution and here they're portrayed as benevolent men quoting the Dalai Lama.

It's not much different than, at the same time, Pee-wee's Playhouse which reimagined Eisenhower era pop culture and kitsch with black cowboys, camp and gay inside jokes.

[Mr Sausage]

Oh, I think he's definitely nostalgic for the early postwar era! No question about it. The music, films, etc were clearly of great inspiration to him, every bit as much as Francis Bacon. And, yes, the idea of Americana innocence under threat -- Twin Peaks season 3 is essentially a long rant about its total collapse. Ever seen that video where he drives around LA ranting about graffiti?

There is enormous question about it. The opening scene of Blue Velvet says it all: an impossibly magical 50s American landscape of happiness and innocence hiding horror and perversity right inside of it. Not being invade by it. Housing it, masking it, hiding it from view. A preppy, wholesome, babyfaced golden child discovering an abyss of sexual perversity latent inside him; a 50s beauty, all charm and grace, powerless to stop herself from enjoying her own abuse; a gang of sadists and criminals, all of whom are drenched in 50s culture, who exemplify it more than any other character to the point of being played by actors from that era. Or Twin Peaks, where the villains are not modernity but powerful men like fathers and Reagan-ite business men; where wholesome exteriors hide horrible secrets.

Not one single Lynch movie or tv series is set in the 1950s. His kitschy Americana is never granted any social weight--it's mainly iconography. If Lynch is nostalgic, he may well be nostalgic for the products of the 50s, like the music or the movies or the fashion. But he does not mistake that for a nostalgia for 50s American society. Hence how many of his movies locate evil within 50s Americana; how indifferent or outright critical they are towards central 50s institutions.

I think that's right. But only to an extent: the FBI is certainly a 1950s institution and here they're portrayed as benevolent men quoting the Dalai Lama.

It's not much different than, at the same time, Pee-wee's Playhouse which reimagined Eisenhower era pop culture and kitsch with black cowboys, camp and gay inside jokes.

Yeah, misleading of me to not address it. It does use something like Hoover’s official image of the typical FBI agent as a clean cut, upright boyscout. But, at the same time, the FBI as an institution barely exists in the show. And when this or that figure from it does appear, like Gordon Cole, it’s absurdist. So I’d say it all functions more as iconography than a genuine love for the institution, given how uninterested the show is in how the FBI actually works.

[swo17]

Have you seen The Hole in 3D? I've been curious about this. I have yet to see it in any format.

I finally got around to watching the UK 3D Blu-ray. I'm not sure the film is one I'd be inclined to revisit in 2D, but Dante has a lot of fun with the 3D format. It might actually be one of the best films to use to show that off--there's a lot of room for extreme perspectives when your film's main set piece is a bottomless pit, for instance. But he even gets a lot out of more mundane views, such as a lingering shot of a doorknob. Some of the story's a little creaky, but the spectacle of it all makes any shortcomings easy to overlook

[Maltic]

Sounds great!

[colinr0380]

The Red Letter Media guys have just started a series of videos ranking Joe Dante's films, with an amazing anecdote about the sled from Citizen Kane at the opening of the video. As with the John Carpenter ranking they did, I disagree with some of their specific rankings, since Piranha is amazing with a wonderful tongue-in-cheek approach to a Jaws rip-off film that is far better than it had any right to be, melding humour with brutal horror, and making the horror hit harder for the humourous moments. They also don't seem to recognise that the tiny homunculous moment in the film is Dante seeming to do a homage to Tod Browning's 1936 film The Devil-Doll, and they do not even mention the significance of Barbara Steele's presence at all! (And personally I love the "filmed later on in a swimming pool" disconnected seeming piranha effects, because they add that eerie (and maybe completeley unintentional) sense that, as soon as the characters dip below the waterline that they enter a different dimension entirely where they are now doomed. As long as they keep their heads above water, they'll be OK! Its the same kind of eerie sense that you also get from that Death Bed: The Bed That Eats film!)

I also disagree with the low ranking of The Howling, since that (as with Piranha) is kind of notable as a female-centred horror film. The doubling of characters of the other investigating couple in the film that the Red Letter Media guys complain about was also a major trend in horror films of the time (see many Hammer Dracula films, or even the early Argento films. Or say the supporting characters in the original version of The Stepford Wives), where you have to have the people who seem to be the main characters early on get doomed not through any fault of their own but because in some ways they have encountered the horror too early in the film to survive! These initial characters have to die in filmic terms both to provide some gory kills in the early section of the film and to raise the stakes for our actual main characters, who will be the ones to be targeted next. Plus, surprisingly since they tackled John Carpenter before, the final 'usurping the media to get the message out' ending of The Howling makes for an excellent double bill with the final middle finger of Carpenter's They Live!

I do generally agree on Explorers, as I find that pop culture addled alien at the end annoying too. Although I love the majority of the film being about the specific manual labouring joys of DIY-ing your spacecraft. Whilst the Red Letter Media guys connect forward to Iron Man, I wonder if Dante was doing a bit of a homage to the first half or so of This Island Earth, which has our scientist heroes receiving and building a mail order piece of alien technology to 'prove their worth' to the alien beings, with the inevitable disappointment there that the 'super-advanced aliens' prove to be just as flawed and destroying their own world as the humans are! We humans may be flawed and childish but the consolation is that other alien species are riven by the same issues, so comparatively we may not be doing too bad!

And whilst I agree that The Hole does have issues, the main problem is that it pales in comparison to the actual 1980s film The Gate, which tackles all of the same material in a more full blooded fashion!

[colinr0380]

And here's Part 2 of the Red Letter Media ranking. I have no notes on this one (and love the point out of the actress playing the mother in Gremlins turning up in Scream, which I had not realised before!), although whilst I agree on the comments about Small Soldiers I would still stand by my older comment that whilst Small Soldiers is superficially Gremlins again, its not about scary horror or mischievous anarchy in this case but instead perhaps better seen as a critique of the notion of 'playing' at war versus being confronted by the real thing, and the catharsis of tackling some of the most difficult subjects of violence and loss obliquely through toys, or metaphors in general, before you may have to face such things directly in reality as an adult. That makes it very different thematically from the Gremlins films, and perhaps closer to the Toy Story ones. Plus in the idea of the toys just fulfilling the function they were intended for, and pursuing their 'life goals' to the ultimate extreme, it weirdly prefigures the themes of Spielberg's A.I. - Artificial Intelligence!

[okcmaxk]

Matinee below Innerspace, the disrespect…

It’s good, cast’s all great, but two hours? Amblin syndrome. They get into the overpacking/“two movies in one” as a plus, but that’s where it derails for me.

[colinr0380]

I think at least Jay is more of an Ed Wood fan, at least in terms of 90s biopics about 1950s B movie creators. Which probably makes sense for people who are aspiring filmmakers themselves to gravitate more towards as compared to Matinee which feels much more about the sense of what it is like to be an audience member for the movies (and in particular a teenage audience member in that specific cultural millieu) than of being the creator themselves. Which is probably the reason for that distance from John Goodman's William Castle-styled figure that plays into the 'flaw' they mention of the film taking too long to set things up before getting to the second half of the movie premiere - because whilst he is a very important figure, in Matinee we're seeing the showman from a slightly more mythologised remove (perhaps the perspective Dante had towards these figures in his own teens) rather than on an equal footing as the main character of their story. And eventually our teen main character misses the majority of the premiere due to being locked in that vault anyway (though has the compensation of a first kiss), with even the film itself getting overwhelmed by the more pressing real world threats.

[therewillbeblus]

Gotta love that amazing dialog in MANT! too. My favorite: "You can't drop an atomic bomb on Chicago!"

This is actually a verbatim line from Peter Graves in some monster movie that I can't identify, as seen in The Movie Orgy.. I wonder how many lines in MANT! are taken word-for-word from these old movies Dante found!

[Orlac]

Gotta love that amazing dialog in MANT! too. My favorite: "You can't drop an atomic bomb on Chicago!"

This is actually a verbatim line from Peter Graves in some monster movie that I can't identify, as seen in The Movie Orgy.. I wonder how many lines in MANT! are taken word-for-word from these old movies Dante found!

BEGINNING OF THE END?

[colinr0380]

The one Peter Graves movie I have seen other than Airplane! is that astonishing Communist scare film Red Planet Mars, in which Graves somehow manages to keep a deadpan expression throughout all of the gloriously ridiculous proceedings.

[therewillbeblus]

Gotta love that amazing dialog in MANT! too. My favorite: "You can't drop an atomic bomb on Chicago!"

This is actually a verbatim line from Peter Graves in some monster movie that I can't identify, as seen in The Movie Orgy.. I wonder how many lines in MANT! are taken word-for-word from these old movies Dante found!

BEGINNING OF THE END?

I believe that’s right

[Matt]

Classic Bert I. Gordon giant critter movie. Best seen in the MST3K version with the host segment where Crow presents his new play Peter Graves Goes to the University of Minnesota.

[beamish14]

Dante’s first assembly VHS of Gremlins is being digitized. This is likely significantly longer than the preview cut 35mm print which was the source of the deleted scenes on WB’s DVD/Blu-Ray

[TechnicolorAcid]

Finished up Joe Dante’s mammoth compilation film, The Movie Orgy, and while it took a little while for me to align with its wavelength, once I did, I kept wishing that it would never end. Many people have commented on how the strength of the movie is in how Dante’s way of meshing hundreds of different sources feels like a Gremlin running loose in the theater, scrapping together whatever it can into one film, and while I do agree to some extent, I think it undermines how Dante is so effortlessly able to use the seemingly random clips to play off each other. Initially, it’s done through the use of ads to serve as interludes to create a sense of what it must’ve felt like to be scrolling through TV channels back then cutting through fractured stories sponsored by Colgate until Dante gleefully allows the clips to build towards an almost-apocalyptic sense of scale as different monsters begin to emerge and terrorize the film from 50 feet giants to giant locusts to Richard Nixon as the film turns from a simple tongue-in-cheek tribute to the movies and TV Joe Dante grew up watching into a destruction of the perceived safety of American prosperity (in many ways, an argument could be made that despite the very clearly contrasting tones, this does feel like a sibling film to Bruce Conner’s similar collage-film Report). It’s also just consistently very funny, not just in the absurdity of the clips (“Don’t crowd me” being my favorite bit of the film) but again, in how Dante gleefully uses pairings of clips to build jokes on their own. While Gremlins 2 is my favorite of his films, ultimately I think I have to declare this as his best, if only for the clear love Dante has for every clip in here.

[therewillbeblus]

“Don’t crowd me” being my favorite bit of the film

I've seen the film a few times now, and this running joke gets funnier every time. I didn't quite realize how often he says it until I revisited, but the volume is remarkable

[TechnicolorAcid]

“Don’t crowd me” being my favorite bit of the film

I've seen the film a few times now, and this running joke gets funnier every time. I didn't quite realize how often he says it until I revisited, but the volume is remarkable

I think what makes it funnier is the fact that, because they all come from different scenes, you have to assume that the filmmakers of the original film (Speed Crazy iirc) thought this was such a cool line that they decided to make it the main character’s catchphrase and didn’t realize how unintentionally hilarious it was. I also just realized that the lead actress of Speed Crazy and the lead actress of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (which is arguably the staple film in The Movie Orgy) share the same first name, which is a very fun coincidence for me

[JamesF]

Better yet, while Dick Miller sadly doesn't show up anywhere in The Movie Orgy, his on-screen wife in Gremlins, Jackie Joseph (Audrey from the original Little Shop of Horrors) shows up in the Speed Crazy opening!