Category Archives: DVDs

Lobster Films, C’est Tres Bon

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While doing a little research on Georges Méliès this weekend, I learned of Lobster Films. (Site in English et Francais, but beware — most pages have embedded Quicktimes, and the lame Javascript “faux frames” text-scrolling doodad does not work until the damn movie loads all the way.) Call me slow on the draw, but somehow I had not heard of them before.

This amazing French private archive and restoration lab, helmed by Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange, holds some 20,000 rare, old films — a number of them unspeakably rare, as in “sole surviving print” rare. What led me to them was learning, for example, that in 1999 they discovered 250 nitrate prints (some 200 pounds!) made between 1896 and 1903 stashed in a cupboard in an old French house up for sale. They were only able to save 98 of the films, but amidst the cache were no less than 17 Melies films previously thought to have been lost forever. (Alas, extensive Googling produced no list of titles, dag blast it.)

In 2002, Bromberg found in Spain the longest print known — hand-colored and tinted no less — of A Trip to the Moon, running a full 25 minutes. Better yet, they were able to save and restore the film (mostly: the 100 year old nitrate was apparently in pretty bad shape) and premiered it at a free open air screening in downtown Paris.

In recent years Bromberg has been taking portions of the Lobster Films archive on the festival circuit, mainly in Europe (particularly Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, aka the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, in Italy), but with occasional stops Stateside in NY City and at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

I was also pleased to learn that Lobster Films has produced a series of DVDs, Retour de Flamme volumes one through 4 (scroll down at that link for links to other volumes). These drool-inducing collections of short films from various periods are thoughtfully produced with both French and English language options. There is also (brace yourself) Les Premiers pas du Cinéma (“First Steps of Cinema”), a 2-DVD set of early color and sound films with material dating as far back as 1898. The damn thing even has 1908 sound films of freakin’ Caruso singing!

The catch? Not a one of those is available in the States and they are all Zone 2 (so you’ll need a all-region player). Thanks to l’internet you can buy them from French online retailers such as Amazon.fr (which has help info, including overseas shipping details, in English), Alapage.fr, or Heeza.

If that doesn’t suit you for whatever reason, you can still get an appreciation for the fine work that Lobster Films is doing by checking out the fantastic Charley Bowers 2-disc set, as well as their collaboration with Kino on some pretty great-looking silent comedy and slapstick collections.

Bon appetit, mes amis!

Zero Boys Live at Como’s 1984 Reunion Concert DVD

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I’ve just finished watching a DVD-R of legendary Indianapolis hardcore band, the Zero Boys, playing their 1984 reunion show at Comos’ Pizza. Man. What a kick-ass band, what a good show, and what a trip down memory lane for me. Many thanks to olde pal Karen O. for sending it to me.

The DVD is released by Rifleman Records (which I do believe is Bill Levin’s latest thing — Bill having been their original manager, among other endeavors), and distributed exclusively through Choke Inc. in Chicago. They can be reached at 1-773-539-5411. I think they have a site at choked.com but what’s there now is only a “coming soon” page, so I can’t be positive. Unfortunately, from what I can tell thus far, there is currently no way to buy the disk online, and not even a postal address on the thing. (How punk rock is that?) But if you live in or are (god help you) passing through Indianapolis, you can apparently buy a copy at Vibes Music.

The December 30, 1984 show was recorded on VHS (hey, it was 1984) with a single hand-held camera and an outboard room mic, which means the audio is actually pretty decent all things considered. (No, it’s not a board recording, which in this case would have totally sucked; that’s engineer-speak for “a mic that’s not built in to the camera”.)

The quality of the digitial transfer is so-so. Sure, this is basically a home-made deal, but still it’s a little disappointing. We’re already dealing with a sub-optimum master: 22-year-old VHS. Due to whatever reason or circumstance, the capture was encoded at a lower quality level than I would have liked. As a result, digital artifacts and “jaggies” are apparent in the blacks, and when the camera (or people) movement is particularly frantic they also become bothersome. It’s certainly still quite watchable, but considering this is the only surviving footage of the band, one would have hoped for a little better.

But the real mega-bummer of the DVD is that the audio cuts out for the first five songs of the several encores, dying in smack the middle of their rendition of The Stooges’ “No Fun.” Evidently the outboard mic came unplugged. Damn drunk punks. If you crank your volume, you can hear the faintest of ghost audio and eventually the full audio kicks back in. Fortunately for me, I still have my analog cassette bootleg of the show, including the tracks inaudible on the DVD, so I can, well, punk rock it by playing the cassette along with the DVD.

(For anyone out there who might be wondering, the missing songs are: “No Fun”, “Livin’ in the ’80s”, “Slam and Worm”, “Down the Drain”, and “New Generation”.)

The paper insert that comes with the DVD gets almost every fact wrong, which is both hilarious and sad. It’s 1984 and “The Zero Boys have just returned from touring [to support the] VICIOUS CIRCLE album.” Wrong: that tour had happened a full two years prior. “They just finish[ed] writing [the] HISTORY OF… [cassette].” Wrong: History of… was a posthumous compilation of previously recorded songs, though a couple-few had not been released before. Nothing new was written or recorded for that release. “This was their HOMECOMING SHOW.” Wow, totally wrong: they broke up in 1982; this was their first reunion as a band, two years later. It was a kind of homecoming, I suppose, but it had nothing to do with any tour. I just hope the errors were a honest result of the fogging effect of time, and not some lame marketing ploy to avoid the term “reunion show” or something.

All of that said, I give this release a Shecky rating of 4 Bottles of Ricky’s Wild Irish Rose. (That means it’s good.) The band are in top form, totally tight, and furthermore this is the only surviving footage of the original line up.

It’s also an even rarer artifact in that it documents the scene that lasted less than a year at a place called Cosmo’s Pizza, on the northwest side of Indianapolis. The owner was some NY transplant jag-off named Jeff (I forget his last name). I do believe Cosmo’s may have introduced Buffalo chicken wings to the Circle Shitty. Now, 99.9 percent of the employees (including me) were punks — probably mostly because we could be had (and abused) for real cheap. Cosmo’s was probably the only place in all of Indiana with more than two employees that would let you wear torn punk t-shirts and spiked wristbands and sport a mohawk on the job. Even the delivery guys (like me) were allowed to wear our punk rock on our metaphoric sleeves. (No self-respecting punk actually had sleeves, but you know what I mean.)

One of those employees was “Starvin’” Marvin Goldstein, and thanks to him Cosmo’s began to host punk shows on the weekends. In mid-’80s Indiana, this was no small thing. Whole years could go by with no steady venue for punk shows. House parties were regularly busted and shut down by the cops. A venue (such as the Indianapolis Arts Academy) might crop up and have shows for a few months, and then vanish. Being over 21 was no solution — convincing the bars to book any band that didn’t play covers, let alone punk or hardcore, was like taking the mountain to Mohammed one spoonful at a time.

Almost everyone working at Cosmo’s was a member of a band or involved in the Indy scene somehow: I was in Tha Paranoidz, Rapper was in The Primates and had been in The Slammies, Bam Bam was the drummer for Dandelion Abortion, Marvin was a promoter from the early days, and I know there were others (sorry y’all, my memory fails me after all this time).

As a result, for a little less than a year Cosmo’s “Punk Rock” Pizza was the Hoosier Mecca for punk shows. The Zero Boys reunion show documented on this DVD was, without question, the crowning moment of the time. (Ultimately, the original Cosmo’s ran into all sorts of trouble. One day I showed up for work only to discover the place had been padlocked by the IRS. It later re-opened, and had a few more troubles along the way. In the end Rapper bought the business and re-opened it, even managing to open a couple branch stores after a while. The punk shows, however, were long gone.)

The Zero Boys were and remain the punk band from Indiana. (Personally, I still think they were also one of the very best original hardcore bands, period. I may be biased, but no less than Jack Rabid hisself puts them on the same level as Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Bad Religion, and even the mighty Dead Kennedys.) The original members first met in 1979, forming the band in the summer of 1980. In September 1980, they released the so-so Livin’ in the Eighties 7-inch EP. A single cut, an early version of “New Generation,” appeared on the 1981 Gulcher Records compilation, Red Snerts.

Original bassist John Mitchel was replaced by Tufty “My English Accent is Totally Fake” Clough in June, 1981. That August, in a single four-hour session recorded live in the studio followed by a single mixing session, they completed the seminal Vicious Circle LP, which was ultimately released in early 1982. (Fyi, Vicious Circle has just been reissued on limited-edition vinyl. You can also purchase MP3s of the album at eMusic.com.) The difference between Livin’ in the Eighties and Vicious Circle is astonishing. While the EP is lo-fi and, frankly, rather plodding, Vicious Circle is well-produced, manic, ultra-tight and head-and-shoulders above most of the hardcore releases that proliferated at the time.

Around that time (1982), lead singer Paul Mahern formed Affirmation Records and released a great and locally-influential compilation of midwestern punk bands, The Master Tape, which featured three Zero Boys classics.

In the midst of all this, the Zero Boys did two tours to support Vicious Circle. A brief east coast tour included dates in Boston and NYC. A later west coast tour that same year — described by Paul in a contemporaneous interview published in Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll as “a total unorganized fiasco” — led to the break up of the band. Despite their undead status, in 1983 additional tracks appeared on the double-LP compilation The Master Tape, Vol. II (scroll down for full track listings) and, according to the previously cited interview, there were plans for a second LP to be titled Payback is Hell. Nothing ever came of that LP (though reportedly some recording was done). 1984 saw the final Zero Boys release, the History Of… cassette — a compilation of previously released and a few unreleased recordings made by the band when they were still together.

Following the 1982 west coast tour, bassist Tufty Clough joined Toxic Reasons, which then went on to greater punk rock glory and numerous vinyl releases. Lead singer Paul Mahern went on to form the garage-psychedelia influenced Dandelion Abortion (releasing a cassette and an EP) and then, in the late ’80s, The Datura Seeds (which released an EP, an LP, and I think a single or two). Ultimately, Paul pretty much stopped playing live (except for the occasional Zero Boys reunion and possibly other side projects I’m unaware of, having left Indiana in 1984), moved to Bloomington, IN, and devoted his attention to being a recording engineer and raising his son, Paisley. He has since resurrected the old Affirmation Records label, motivated in large part by the musical efforts of his nephew and his band, John Wilkes Booze. Guitarist Terry Howe went on to join Toxic Reasons circa 1986. Eventually (in no particular order) he married, relocated to Florida, and became the father of twin sons. Sadly, he died of a heroin overdose in 2001. A very tragic loss. Drummer Mark Custinger has remained active in the Indianpolis music scene lo these many years, participating in more bands than my Google fingers can keep up with. From what I can tell, though, he is widely — and quite correctly — regarded as one of the best drummers around.

Around 1988 or so, Terry Howe was replaced by (talented) young pup, Vess Ruhtenberg — who was still in junior high when Vicious Circle first came out. Over the years this new line up has played the occasional rare reunion show, and even recorded two albums of new material (which I confess I’ve never heard): Make It Stop (Bitzcore [Germany], 1991) and The Heimlich Maneuver (Skyclad, 1993). Fwiw, Jack Rabid describes these records as being “more metallic-shaded.”

In 1991, Selfless Records released a limited edition bubblegum-colored split 7-inch EP with Toxic Reasons on one side (“No Pity” and “White Noise”) and the new-line-up Zero Boys on the other (with new versions of “Black Network News” and “Blood’s Good”).

The Amazing Bruce Bickford and Monster Road – Run, Don’t Walk

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Great news! Bruce Bickford, one the most gifted and beautifully demented animators in the history of the universe, may finally get his due with the imminent DVD release of Monster Road (Bright Eye Pictures, 2004), the award winning documentary about him. You can watch a trailer for it here (embedded Quicktime, 3.3 mb), and apparently it will be playing on the Sundance Channel real soon now.

You can also listen to a September 2004 NPR interview with Bruce Bickford.

I confess, to my shame, that I missed the film when it did the festival circuit (I vaguely recall it played at SIFF…woe betide my hermitish nature!), which could explain my utter astonishment to learn that Bickford lives near Seattle. Had I known this, I would have tracked him down and camped out at a respectful distance and thrown any money I had at him, begging him to please, please please just pursue his wildest animation dreams. Hmmm…maybe it’s not too late?

Who is Bruce Bickford? Well…think Will Vinton on a heroic dose of peyote doing jigs with Schrödinger’s cat. (Who’s Will Vinton? sigh. Well, he’s best known for the California Raisons, but is far better represented by films like the justifiably Oscar-winning Closed Mondays [1974].)

Bruce Bickford is a self-taught clay animator (though he does line and paper cut-out animation as well). His first animation efforts were in 1964, but he first gained artistic focus in 1969 with what he describes as his “first attempt[s] at morphing and free form psychedelic movement.” This marked the beginning of a productive period that over the next five years resulted in 28 minutes (give or take) of animation that he’ll now own up to. During this period he worked mostly in clay, though he also dabbled in some animation with line drawings and hot wax on glass, the latter an experimental technique first used some 40 years earlier by Oskar Fischinger…but pretty much by no one else since.

Bickford is best known for work that appeared (extensively) in the Frank Zappa mostly-concert film, Baby Snakes (1979), and this is how I first came to know his brilliant work. Superlatives fail to describe the astonishing, jaw-droppingly visionary fever dream of metamorphic stream of consciousness of the animation. The feeling of raw awe only explodes upon witnessing footage of Bruce at work: the scale he was working in was absolutely miniscule, an utter paradox when compared to the scope and detail of the images unspooling before you. Zappa conducts his ensemble at the time in musical improvisations to accompany the animation, with the film periodically dissolving back and forth between the animation and the group performing in the studio.

The animation in Baby Snakes was the product of a then five-year-old relationship with Zappa, who had managed to convince Bickford to move to Los Angeles to work for him in 1974 (according to the official bio). At that time, he turned over to Zappa most of the films he produced in the early ’70s. The fate of those films is unclear to me — a question likely addressed in the Monster Road doc. No doubt they still reside somewhere in the vast Zappa archives. In any event, Zappa deserves enormous credit for fostering a brilliant but fringe talent (not unlike himself) — though I say that without knowing how Mr. Bickford himself might feel about that relationship (or the fate his early films).

In 1987, Bickford completed Prometheus Garden, a 27 minute film with a line animation intro. Circa April 2005, according to BruceBickford.com, there were “discussions with a couple people” toward releasing a DVD of Prometheus Garden and some additional newer work. The current status of that is not made clear.

In 1990, Zappa’s Honker Home Video imprint released the VHS tape, The Amazing Mr. Bickford — 60 glorious and almost overwhelming minutes devoted entirely to Bruce’s animation. Musical accompaniment included works by Zappa and company, as well as (appropriately) compositions by Pierre Boulez as performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. Oh hell yeah. It is AN UNFORGIVABLE CRIME that this has never been released on DVD. Seriously: sort it out, guys. Make it happen. Dweezil, Bruce — I’m beggin’ you. (As I write this, it occurs to me I may well be transposing some/most/all of my memories of the Bruce-working and Frank-conducting footage from The Amazing Mr. Bickford to Baby Snakes. Guess I better re-watch ‘em and figure it out — apologies if I’m in error.)

During the 1990s, Bickford managed to get some more material into circulation, primarily for MTV station IDs, a commercial or two, and a segment in a music video for a group called Carnival Arts. Hardly the sorts of things worthy for such a giant talent. Were he living and working in Europe, I suspect Bruce Bickford would be a revered household name, at least among film folk, instead of the mere “underground” (albeit still revered) figure he is here in the Da States.

In the meantime, keep an eagle eye out for the Monster Road DVD, which is currently slated to be back from the factory circa March 24. You may also want to subscribe to the official Bruce Bickford email list, which will only send announcements when Monster Road or other Bickford-related products are released.

All hail Bruce Bickford.

Restoring the Original King Kong

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Courtesy of Jeff Economy, a couple great articles on the surprisingly laborious effort to restore the original King Kong (1933) for DVD release in 2005, coinciding with Peter Jackson’s remake.

In a nutshell, the problem is the original negative was lost long ago. That meant the restorationists had to scour the globe for the best surviving prints and dupe negatives, meticulously log each and every shot from every candidate copy, and then piece it all together. The situation was such that in some cases they used a shot from one print, then tacked on a handful of frames to the end from another. Only once that had all been assembled could they proceed to digital restoration which was also far more labor intensive than your usual project like this. The same had to be done with the soundtrack (just because a print’s image was best didn’t mean its soundtrack was). For that they even used material from a 16mm print.

Of course, there’s a lot more to it, and the following make for fascinating reading.

The January 2006 issue of Millimeter magazine has a rather lengthy sidebar — “Kong, the Original” — that provides a good overview of the lengths that had to be gone to, the processes used, and the decisions made along the way.

Meanwhile, an earlier piece at The Digital Bits, “King Kong: The DVD Interview,” is a transcript of an interview by the site’s editor with George Feltenstein, Senior VP Theatrical Catalog Marketing for Warner Home Video; Ned Price, VP of Mastering for Warner Brothers Technical Operations; Ronnee Sass, Executive Director of Publicity for Warner Home Video.

If I may suggest, if you’re going to spring for the DVD (and haven’t yet already), the 2-disk collector’s edition is well worth the extra few bucks. The feature-length documentary on the second disk is truly excellent and worth the price of admission on its own merits, and the other extras (including Team Jackson’s recreation of the legendary lost “Spider Pit sequence”) are tasty icing on the cake.

You should also take pains to get the DVD edition, released simultaneously, of Mighty Joe Young (1949 — NOT to be confused with that Disney crap from a few years ago), which remains an immensely entertaining film and features some jaw-droppingly advanced stop-motion animation and matte work executed by Willis O’Brien (Kong’s animation poppa) and his assistant, Ray Harryhausen, the latter day stop-mo king who made his feature debut with this film.

Finally, Son of Kong (1933) is also newly available — in fact all three of these flicks are available together as a box set — but, I dunno, is probably of purchase-interest mainly to completists. As the release date shows, it was rushed into production (on the cheap) after the blockbuster success of “daddy” Kong and, alas, it shows. Its 75 minute running time barely merits the term “feature film,” the effects are good (once they finally show up) but not quite up to snuff, and the matte work is much simpler — when stop-mo is combined with live action, it gets its own section of the frame, with none of the combining and overlaying from the original Kong. The script is an embarrassment, going for cornball and lame ethnic humor rather than, um, pretty much anything else. Finally, the DVD print includes obvious jump cuts and gaping continuity holes suggesting, at best, that whole sequences are missing or, at worst, the poor thing was butchered in the cradle by the cigar chompers at RKO. One imagines the talented Willis O’Brien cringing in embarrassment and frustration even now, from beyond the grave.

3D Monster Classics on DVD-R

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The Old Time Radio UK web site is offering DVD-Rs of 3D versions of the classic films Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) and It Came From Outer Space (1953), and a real treasure: a one-of-a-kind collection of 3D shorts including both of the Three Stooges’ 3D shorts (Pardon My Backfire and Spooks), Audioscopics (the first mass-released 3D film in America), A Solid Explanation, Hot Rythm, Time for Beany, plus a short excerpt from Kiss Me Kate.

The prices are quite reasonable — a paltry US$14 a pop. The catch? All of the DVD-Rs require the use of expensive and hard-to-find field-sequential LCD glasses, which means ye olde red-green anaglyphic or polarized glasses will not work. This is double edged, since the LCD method tends to produce a superior image when it comes to home video (and big caveat here: I have not seen any of these DVD-Rs and cannot attest to their actual quality).

3D has suffered a terrible fate in home video. The superior polarized method (used for all of the flicks from the original ’50s craze and the ’80s revival) is impossible on a toob, and all of the red-green anaglyphic releases have sucked visual ass due mostly to incompetent mastering. Anaglyphic film prints — even reduction prints of originally polarized films such as It Came From Outer Space and The Mask – tend to work well enough. But on all of the home video editions I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen almost all of them) the 3D is shot to hell because during mastering someone felt compelled to tinker with the focal length and convergence. In most of the home video editions, you can literally see the convergence get shifted from shot to shot, resulting in a blinding headache and a sorely disappointing 3D experience that does zero justice to the original viewing experience.

Watch this space for more obscure ramblings about 3D film in the near future.

Scarecrow Video on NPR

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Today’s Morning Edition featured a story on Seattle’s own Scarecrow Video, which I’m pretty sure has one of the (if not the) largest collections of rentals in the known universe.

On that count, Scarecrow is arguably neck-and-neck with Facets Multimedia in Chicago (certainly the winner for that side of the continent), though Facets does get extra points for running an excellent home video distribution wing emphasizing Eastern European stuff. I mean c’mon, any rental shop that boasts of the exclusive distro contract for stuff like Kieslowski’s The Decalogue (for starters) and runs an art-house movie theater in the same building definitely wins a prize.

But as I recall from back in the day, Facets was a little slim on stuff like Godzilla, Mexican wrestling movies, and Italian giallo. Scarecrow has all the arty stuff that’s good for your brain and good old fashioned exploitation mind rot that’s good for a lazy Sunday morning. And porn, too. And while they may not run their own movie theater, they do regularly sponsor excellent film events around town. For my money, having sampled both at length, I’ll take Scarecrow. Too bad for you that they don’t do rentals by mail (Facets does). You’d think there’d be some sort of rival in NYC, Los Angeles or San Francisco, but if there is one I’ve never heard of it. (Please do feel free to comment a correction.)

Seattle’s boon is all thanks to George Latsios, who passed away in March 2003 in his hometown of Kozani, Greece. Thanks, George, from the bottom of all our hearts.

Anyway, the basic angle of the Morning Edition story is that while Joe Sixpack chains like Blockbuster are suffering in the face of the NetFlix onslaught, Scarecrow is thriving due to its insanely diverse collection. Not true. Those long (but swift) lines every night have nothing to do with it. It’s actually all because of the late fees I personally pay to them on a weekly basis. So next time you bump into me somewhere, I will deign to accept your thanks for single-handledly keeping this precious Seattle treasure afloat. But sorry, no autographs. Identity theft and all that, ya know.

If you’re a real glutton for punishment, you can visit the Film Threat section at Scarecrow and rent the VHS copy of Jim Sikora’s Bring Me the Head of Geraldo Rivera, which also includes the film Stagefright Chameleon starring none other than your’s truly. (My group trondant shaman also did the soundtrack, along with some contributions by Illusion of Safety.) Also featured in the film is the legendary Lee Groban, author of the truly epic and ever-expanding 5,000-plus-page poem, The Cure for Insomina, visonary artist, and bona fide Guiness World Record holder (world’s longest film — 72 hours, I believe — which is an adaptation of The Cure for Insomnia).

Okay, I gotta go. I’m suddenly inspired to rent the Region 4 Thai language DVD of Godzilla: Final Wars, maybe some Black Flag live video, and an episode of Berlin Alexanderplatz.