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It’s a consequence, I suppose, of coming off of the TCM Classic Film Festival and trying to cram too many movies into too few days, of talking movies obsessively with colleagues and fans. I had a lovely post-festival dinner, a cool down I suppose you could say, a few days after the festival closed with fellow live bloggers Nathaniel Thompson and Glenn Erickson and DVD company owner/film director-producer David Gregory… and what did we talk about? Movies. After that I fell into a sort of funk as I returned to my backlog of movie-related work. When I wasn’t writing about movies during the day I found I wanted to do anything but watch one at night. And so I didn’t. I just… stopped. And that, of course, got me to thinking.
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How do I … what’s the word? … recharge? How do I get excited about movies again? I wasn’t consciously looking for a method, a device for achieving this end but I guess subconsciously I was chewing on the problem. And the solution came, as solutions so often do, without me having to actually do anything. I was simply looking around and I saw…
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… a simple Mexican vampire lady, circa 1960. (If you must know, Lorena Velazquez in LA NAVE DE LOS MONSTRUOS/SHIP OF MONSTERS, your basic singing cowboy/alien invasion/vampire movie.) I think the fact that the image is 2nd or 3rd generation, a little fuzzy, a see bit inky, chocked with chiraroscuro, intensified my reaction, surrounding the frame with an air of mystery, of childhood terror. And that’s all it took for me to feel like I was back on the inside looking out.
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It says a lot about me, if no one or nothing else, that the thing that reawakened my love of movies is a frame from a 50 year old Mexican monster movie and not one of the great masterpieces of the medium… not CITIZEN KANE (1941), a classic movie that I watch and rewatch as if it were a guilty pleasure, or…
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… that immortal paean to manliness, THE WILD BUNCH (1969), or…
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… the equally inky and indelibly freaky INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956), or…
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… the always-welcome, ever-unsettling THE BIRDS (1963), or, speaking of blood-suckers…
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… my childhood favorite, THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS (1967). No, it wasn’t any of these films, which I hold near and dear to my heart. It was this cheap old thing…
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… that got my blood pumping again. And I don’t mean the movie itself, which is intoxicatingly nuts, but rather just this image. And those dumb-ass fangs and the papier mache boulders and that whatever-the-hell-that-tree-is-made-out-of. It was all of these things squeezed into the mise en scene as if packaged to resuscitate and delight me. And it got me thinking… movies move but so often the thing that keeps you excited about movies are still frames. Images frozen, preserving a single moment. Like this:
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… or this…
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… or this…
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… or this…
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Movies have gotten so restless over the past twenty years, so unsure of themselves, so awkward and over-eager to please. Looking at still frames reminds us of the work that used to go into making movies. Sure, making movies is still wicked hard but too many filmmakers these days seem embarrassed by their work, like fledgling water colorists who are eager to have you look at their still life but then start picking it apart themselves as if wanting to beat you to the punch, withdrawing the offering before it has time to set in your mind. I can’t think of too many new movies — though, to be sure, there are some — from which I can imagine spending that much time poring over their stills. (Complicating the issue, or perhaps clarifying it, is that in the digital realm movies no longer advance one frame at a time.) And so, at my most needy, at my emptiest, I went back to Mexican horror, circa 1960. That trick won’t work for everyone but it did for me. Viva cinema!