One of the joys of reading my library copy of Dan Auiler’s Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic is the pedantic and sometimes argumentative, marginalia on some of the pages. About four pages of the penciled-in marginalia have been erased, presumably by the librarians, while they missed some. Where the librarians missed the notes, some other library patron has added their two cents.

The notes begin in the introduction:

The know-it-all then refutes the author’s description of The Wrong Man:

By page 16, another reader can’t stand it:

Then, after a long silence, the two butt heads again on page 60:

After this, both readers presumably stopped reading or else Auiler stopped pissing off die hard Hitchcock fans. There is no more marginalia.

If anyone cares to expand read the marginalia, I took out the book from the Metrotown branch of the Burnaby Public Library. Call number 791.4372 Ver.

I had to return this book on Tuesday, but only got halfway through it. I will take it out again soon.

So I just watched that new Batman movie, The Dark Knight. As far as superhero movies go, it was ok. I hate superhero movies, by the way, so this is a pretty good rating in my book. It was certainly a million times better than the awful first two ones. I have avoided anything Batman or superhero ever since those ones.

I have a few questions for fans of the movie series and the comics, if there is a Batman fan among my five readers.

1. Is it true that most Batman fans into the whole story just for the gadgets? Or is there some other attraction I don’t know about?

2. Does the comic book’s Batman prefer brainy chicks or arm candy?

3. Are Batman’s bedroom windows like those one-way mirrors in police interrogation rooms?

4. Is the Harvey Dent a character in the comics? Or did they just make up that whole business?

5. Why didn’t they wash off the Joker’s makeup in the police station?

6. Hasn’t Batman heard of Isadora Duncan? He rides around on a scooter with that black cape flowing behind him. A recipe for an accident, if you ask me. [Edit: I thought Isadora Duncan was a more well-known figure. She was an American dancer in the early 20th Century. She died in 1927 at the age of 50 when, riding in a convertible with her young Italian lover, her long scarf got caught in the wheels, whipped her out of the car, and dragged her to her death. I heard somewhere that she was decapitated.]

7. Is Gotham City Chicago? Because there were some Chicago places in some of the backgrounds. Yet Matt tells me that Gotham usually refers to New York. Which is it?

8. If the Joker has custom-made clothes, who is his tailor? Or is sewing another skill he possesses? If he does tailor his clothes, has there ever been a string of unexplained fabric store murders in Gotham City? And how do the police know? Did they undress him to check for tags?

Lately, I have twin obsessions, one on the topic of sharks, the other with Hitchcock films.*

While reading Dan Auiler’s Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, I read this:

The entire script [the 1948 film Rope] was shot in sequence, in a series of ten-minute (full-reel) uninterrupted takes, creating a huge challenge for everyone involved. The single-take gimmick had stopped being an amusing novelty during production and had become an actor’s nightmare. The pressure for an accurate performance was almost unbearable. With each take lasting at least ten minutes, the tension ratcheted upward every passing minute. A gaffe in the first few moments was meaningless - little time and money was lost - but an error near the end of a ten-minute take was devastating to everyone involved, especially the poor soul responsible.

I was curious. A quick perusal of my library’s DVD shelf turned up Rope. I sat down to eat in front of the TV on Wednesday night, ready to find out what these ten-minute takes looked like. Perhaps I should have read the fine print.

It’s very painful. Not just watching the actors, but trying to keep from getting dizzy as the camera follows the characters around the room.

Did I mention it’s a single-room drama? I should have remembered that there is nothing more awkward than watching a bad party, except for actually being at a bad party. I should have learned my lesson after sitting through Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the story of another agonizing party.

I ended up with a headache. On Thursday, the headache hadn’t subsided. My two theories as to the cause of this Rope-induced headache is that either I feel too much for the actors or else I am hurting myself with the need to run out of this claustrophobic party.

Nevertheless, as part of my Hitchcock obsession, I must finish watching this movie. Just not tonight.

*I watched Vertigo and went to San Francisco to hunt down the filming locations at the beginning of this month. I didn’t blog about my trip yet because I haven’t edited the photos.

If you watch The Riches, you know what I’m talking about.  It’s a darn soap opera, with stakes raised higher, beyond any you-slept-with-my-husband-so-I-will-sleep-with-your-father drama.  We’re talking go-to-jail-forever kinda stakes.

I should have never started watching television again.

Seriously, I hate this show.  I nearly pee my pants with each episode I am so frightened for the characters.   If I were this family’s m/patriarch, I would have sold off the furniture and cars a long time ago, and used the money to buy a real house and send the kids off to a normal school.  But no.  That does not make a story.

I took notes during the last episode.  Basically, there are now six problems:

1. The private detective on Pete Minsey’s trail.
2. The Irish ex-con with a degree.  What’s his deal already?  For what are the show’s writers saving him up?
3. The Cael-running-away business.  That cute chick is bad news.
4. The Russian mafia creep.  Eek.  Hugh is so benign in comparison.
5. The parole officer.  Here’s one problem you can’t solve by killing off.
6. Dale.  Yeah, he’s nice now…  And what happened to his one-armed girlfriend?

The only way out is that Di Di starts working to support herself and her brother as her parents live out their prison sentences.  Or the whole family immigrates to Paraguay.

I recently made the mistake of watching the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. However, this won’t be a review of that movie (don’t see it). I wanted to explore one of the characters. No, nothing more on that Depp character. We all know about the Keith Richards thing. Smarter people than myself even suspect Depp’s reference to Adam Ant (maybe the next historical craze, now that we’ve gone through Antoinette, Greek fighting boys and half-serious pirate, will be English highwaymen).

What I do want to point out is the female Asian pirate. The Chinese pirate who didn’t get censored out of the movie by the Chinese government.

Credited as Mistress Ching and played by an American of Japanese extraction, Takayo Fischer nee Tsubouchi), I immediately suspected that this pirate was influenced by Zheng Yi Sao (or Zheng Shi in Wikipedia). A few years ago, this name appeared in a kid’s pirate book, with only a snippet saying that she was active in the first half of the nineteenth century and that she commanded thousands in the South China Sea.

Growing up, like all little girls who want to grow up to pillage coastal towns and keelhaul insubordinate minions, I read up about my predecessors. In those days, the only female pirates who made it into the classical pirate canon were Anne Bonny and Mary Read. All other women in history, the books implied by omission, stayed home and baked strudels.

When I looked up Zheng this time, besides a Wikipedia page (and some cultural influences - she appeared in a Borges story), she was joined by other Chinese pirates with two x-chromosomes. Seven of them according to this list. This other list has three more to add to this roster.

Here’s the total combined list, with possible redundancies and no standardization of romanization (I hate Wade-Giles):

1. Ch’iao K’uo Fü Jën (c. 600 BCE): Chinese legend.
2. Qi Sao (Seventh Elder Sister-in-law): South China Sea, commanded a fleet of 20 ships.
3. Li (wife of Chen Acheng) (early 1800s): South China Sea, was involved in at least 10 robberies at sea with her husband before she was captured and made the slave of a military officer.
4. Shi Xainggu (or Zheng Yi Sao) (1801-1810): South China Sea, commanded either five or six squadrons consisting of 800 large junks, about 1,000 smaller vessels, and between 70,000 and 80,000 men and women.
5. Cai Quin Ma (Matron Cai Quin) (died 1804): South China Sea.
6. T’ang Ch’en Ch’iao: alias “Golden Grace”.
7. Lo Hon-cho (Honcho Lo): took over command on husband’s death in 1921, was a supporter of the Chinese revolution.
8. Wong (1922): united her 50 ship fleet with Lo Hon-cho’s 64 junks.
9. Lai Sho Sz’en (Lai Choi San) (1922-1939): South China Sea, commanded 12 junks.
10. P’en Ch’ih Ch’iko (1936): commanded 100 pirates.
11. Ki Ming (this may be another name for P’en Ch’ih Ch’iko).
12. Huang P’ei-mei (1937-1950s): leader of 50,000 pirates.

Now the little girls of today can have other heroes besides Paris, Lindsay and Nicole.

A planned hi-tech driverless underground railway line set to bring desperately needed transport links to the historic heart of Rome has run into a minefield of Roman remains.

(From the May 14 online edition of the Guardian.)

There’s a scene in Fellini’s Roma where a subway crew finds Roman ruins and calls in the film crew. The delighted visitors crawl through holes to see a fresco with colours as fresh as if they had just been daubed on the walls. Yet, within seconds, the fresco disintegrates into dust and floats off the wall.

Matt didn’t care much for this movie, but after riding the Roman Metro, he changed his mind and wants to watch it again.

What we didn’t know while we were there, is that we stood above the proposed Largo Torre Argentina stop.

This area, near tourist hot spots like Piazza Navona and the Pantheon, is to be one of the stops on Rome’s third subway route, Line C. City planners estimated that 30 metres deep should just about miss the pesky ruins. But they’ve found amphorae that could be part of an villa’s garden and, just as annoying, some imperial era building. The nerve of those ancient Romans!

Instead of pondering all this, we admired the cats:

The ruins are also home to the Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary.

Soon after the ruins were discovered in 1929, the cats moved. Roman cat lovers, derisively called gattare, began feeding leftover pasta to the homeless cats. Though the current batch of felines are (mostly) fixed, irresponsible pet owners still dump cats in the area, resulting in a population of around 250 cats. We counted about 18 from the fences high above the remains of the four temples.

It’s the Dramatic Chipmunk.

(Thank you, Moofie.)

Update: Many people have noticed a resemble of the so-called “chipmunk” to Alfred Hitchcock.

Ok, ok, I am calming down from the news.

28 Days Later has a sequel. 28 Weeks Later is coming out in the next month. Yay! More zombies! Er, more zombie-like* induced armageddons! Yay!

You can see the trailer here. Ha ha. More humans get it. Features lots of running around by protagonists, with no really secure place to hide.

Just as pleasing is that there are at least four other zombie movies at some stage of production or script work right now:

• reader input requested for the second draft of the Autumn script;
• a Dawn of the Dead remake sequel called Army of the Dead;
• Diary of the Dead, a new George Romero one that goes back to the first, low level zombie outbreak (as seen in Night of the Living Dead), this time following around a group of film students;
• Day of the Dead, which is presumably a remake of Romero’s 1985 Day of Dead and starring the Dawn of the Dead remake’s Ving Rhames;
• a scriptwriter is doing a go-over on World War Z, written by Mel Brooks’ son Max (who is, of course, the author of the Zombie Survival Guide).

To tide me over for when these movies come out, my DVD player has been regurgitating the original Romero trilogy and I’ve been revisiting the remake Dawn of the Dead on Youtube. This week my favourites are Tumble-weed Studios remake dubs. The hilarious episodes are here, then here and the latest installation here. Thanks to Proxy Indian.

Over Christmas, I read David Wellington’s novels Monster Island and Monster Nation, and Brian Keene’s The Rising and City of the Dead. While I’m not a big fan of talking zombies, I appreciate that the zombies at least shambled about. My really big fear is thinking zombies that can run. That’s a no-no. Anyhow, I have a review written on these books in one of my journals that I can’t locate. I’ll probably find it some time in the next six months.

PS I bought a house. It can be zombie-proofed in about half an hour.

*The infected in 28 Days Later are not technical Hollywood zombies (i.e. flesh-eating ghouls). They are not Caribbean zombies (i.e. people enslaved by magic). The 28 Days Later infected are simply crazy homicidal maniacs (boo). But they do run amok and turn everyone they bite into one of them (scary!).

**Zombie movies need to stop recycling zombie movie names.

I just finished watching the 2003 Norwegian film Kitchen Stories (or, more correctly, Salmer fra kjøkkenet).

This film about a Swedish study of Norwegian bachelor habits zeroes in on an old hermit called Isak who repeatedly foils quiet researcher Folke’s attempts to observe him from his high chair in the kitchen corner. From that premise, the friendship between the two men develops.

The ambiguous ending, however, sent me running for the internet. Never mind the spoilers (because this is a movie you should see if you like movies about unfolding friendships). What shocked me were the comments that this movie was “slow.”

Huh?

A friendship developing between two unlikely characters is slow? What, they were expected to hit it off from the first? To automatically become friends?

My best friend told me, years after we met, that when she first met me I was standoffish. I was shocked that anyone would mistake supershy me for some snob.

Our friendship didn’t happen from our first meeting - admittedly, the gossip had her to be some crazy slut and I, a poor judge of character, had no idea what to believe. The cautious start to our friendship, begun when she approached me - a stranger! - with a problem she faced. And from that start, I’ve passed seven joyful years for having such a wonderful person in my life.

Watching a friendship unfold is not like watching creepy losers dealing drugs outside cornerstores or one-night stand who morphs into a bunny killer or whatever else the people criticizing this movie feel is relationship material. Real friendships simmer for a while; one friend helps the other, then the other returns the favour, there’s a quiet celebration, and so on.

Then again, I think Emma is one of the greatest novels ever written: a novel about a girl who slowly develops a crush she can’t even place until someone threatens to take it away and that crush turns into love. And The Ambassadors was a thrill as American naïveté fails, articulated thoroughly, when confronted with the seductive charms of Europe. As for Moby Dick, swoon! Each chapter, gloriously different from one another, drips with suspense until you finally get to that loveable whale (and that teasing start with Queequeg and Ishmael in bed).

Unlike my own fiction (going badly, by the way), these stories tell their protagonists’ stories with enough detail to make them believable. This is advice given to amateur writers. Something along the lines that more detail - relevant detail, I may add - makes a character universal.

Or could it really be that I like slow stories? After all I defied Siskel and Ebert and found The Age of Innocence to move at a swift canter. Recently, too, I have managed to trudge my way through Dracula, another milestone in the literature of boredom.

Maybe now is the time to r-attempt Silas Marner, or to watch Kristin Lavransdatter again and not get drowsy. Or maybe I should re-watch Basic Instinct, the only movie I have ever fallen asleep while watching.

I finished reading Arthur Lenning’s The Count: The Life and Films of Bela “Dracula” Lugosi about a week ago. Lennig, a child fan of Lugosi’s, met his hero and actually became friends with the Hungarian actor in the 1940s.

Lennig’s biography of Béla (pronounced “Bay-la”) is what you would expect from a friend who wants to salvage something of his hero’s reputation. The writer spends little time on the five wives and how the first four became ex Mrs. Lugosis: one returns to Hungary and the reader never hears from her again. When did the divorce happen? Or was Lugosi a bigamist when he remarried a year later?

Then there is Lugosi’s drug addiction. The actor, after his fourth divorce and the loss of his wife’s help in curbing his drug use, committed himself to Los Angeles General Hospital’s mental health and hygiene department on April 21, 1955 (a year before his death).

It’s not clear when Lugosi’s addiction to morphine blossomed: he himself hinted at the years 1935, 1938, 1944 and 1948. Lennig, though, a true friend, estimates the last year (page 275), to stress that the strain of his failed career was what drove him to drugs.

What really did in the vestiges of Lugosi’s career was was the 1943 Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Playing Frankenstein’s monster with the brain of Ygor implanted in his head, Lugosi performed the part of Shelley’s original talking monster. However, Universal ultimately removed his spoken scenes from the film, leaving plot holes that studio heads then blamed on Lugosi. Thus, Lugosi’s career with that studio came to an end.

In the same year, Lugosi filmed Columbia’s The Return of the Vampire. This film ran afoul of the critics, driving another stake into Lugosi’s career.

It was only in 1948 that Lugosi’s agent, Don Marlowe, convinced Universal president to hire Lugosi for Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Marlowe “barged” into the president’s office, explained that Lugosi had saved the studio in 1931, that he only made $3500 off the classic film, while Universal reaped millions, and that the studio owed the old man. The studio laid off Ian Keith from the role and replaced him with Lugosi. This meagre offering would be Lugosi’s last major studio role.

One can appreciate Lennig’s efforts in tracking down Lugosi’s oeuvre and the gusto with which he describes the plot of each film, lovingly detailing how Lugosi would pronounce every cheesy mad scientist cliche with theatrical reverence.

Béla Lugosi not only defined the role of Dracula, starred in the first zombie movie, and perfected the mad scientist, he was also the first Ygor, in 1939’s Son of Frankenstein.

In the end, Lugosi’s contributions to American culture have created a career for Gary Larson; spawned movies, songs, books, toys, postage stamps; gave Transylvania’s tourism board a raison d’être; and permanently removed Dracula’s moustache.

Some highlights from the biography and the quirky scripts:

• Premiering on December 19, 1926, was The Devil in the Cheese, in which Lugosi appeared a Greek bandit masquerading as a priest. Worth noting is the synopsis of the play that Arthur Lennig describes: “The father, to find out what makes his daughter tick, eats a bit of mummified Egyptian cheese and so frees the little god Min, who subsequently takes Quigley into his daughter Goldina’s head.” If only her head contained anything of interest: “She dreams of adventure with her young hero on the South Seas, on a desert island, and finally in New York; she also envisions cooking, having babies, nursing, and some politicking from which her husband becomes president.”
• In the 1937 S.O.S. Coast Guard, Bela Lugosi played the mad inventor Bornoff who’s involved in the disintegration gas weapons trade with Morovania (page 208). Who cares about the show. It’s Morovania I want to fixate upon. Morovania is obviously a combination of Moldova and Romania, in the spirit of Molvanîa and Syldavia (Transylvania + Moldova - though more Balkanized than the real Romanian countries). In 1943, he finally played a real Romanian in The Return of the Vampire.
• Another script to drool over is 1941’s The Devil Bat: “Bristling with passionate resentment as only Lugosi can, he seeks revenge by breeding giant bats and giving his enemies a shaving lotion that attracts the creatures.”

Oh the possibilities! Lennig recalls, on page 241, the old adage that “No one would ever go broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

(P.S. Dear Béla, though some people claim you have some sort of double-chinned-ness happening, I have to disagree. You were one sexy bastard and you stole the show in Dracula. Love, FG Maktaaq.)