Blog O’ Leaps

As if designed to underscore a couple of points made below, and at length, (in the post-its entitled “B-Draggled, B-Nighted, B-Gone” and the “Leapster’s Movie-A-Day Plan” one with the particularly unfeasibly long title that starts off “I Say Algy, the Chap in the Blouse and Dress is a Bit Queer…”), no less a news service of record than CNN today delivered an Oscars preview segment that was so completely off its trolley that I can’t even do my usual “pig-biting mad” schtick about the mainstream media’s incredible sloppiness when it comes to covering popular culture, because I’m still laughing too hard to hold the angry-stick steady, much less beat them with it.

So the multi-promo’d premise is, the Oscar nominations are being decided, and CNN is going to give you their authoritative insiders’ guide to the likely front-runners. Now, I’m pretty interested in where the experts see Mickey Rourke’s performance in “The Wrestler” as sitting for these awards (he already won the Golden Globe, I saw the movie, and I think he absolutely deserves Best Actor at the Oscars, and for that matter, at the Tony’s, the Herbert’s, the Wayne’s, the Fred’s and I’d thrown in a Gold Logie just to give him something to use as a paperweight on the hall table for utilities bills. Whatever you think of the movie - which I think is pretty decent incidentally, if not a “great movie” - this is a performance for the ages) so they’ve got me hooked.

Anyway, several ad breaks and world traumas later, when they finally get to the segment, some angular blonde, groomed/tailored thing with a nice clipped English acc’nt blows into the guest’s chair, and the Punch’n'Judy hosts have a bit of a laugh about her being the new CNN movie buff, or some jocularity to that extent. She says, “I wouldn’t say ‘movie buff’ haha”, which is around the time you realise that they’ve just grabbed the nearest person to survive the make-up chair and put them in front of their “authoritative” Academy Awards preview. Just to grind a little extra Drano into the abrasion, she then pipes up brightly “But we all love movies, don’t we?” or similar words to an extremely dim bulb effect. Sure, lady, and, with the possible exception of diabetics, we all like cakes too, but I don’t think they’ll be sacking Nigella Lawson to give me the job.

This is It in a nutshell - exactly how the “serious” media thinks about popular culture. Any oik can do it. Don’t worry about that whole business of putting in years of studying, comparing and analysing movies and absorbing film history. We all like movies after all. Jesus wept. You know, every time I’ve ever been in a pub when a big boxing card was on, the bar was always packed with instant experts on boxing, even if they’d never heard of the fighters in the main event before. By the same token, you wonder why newspapers, radio and TV stations don’t sign them all these drunken bums up as boxing experts on the spot. After any five minutes of Olympic coverage, every Australian blot on a couch can and will tell you that the judges in the parallel bars section of the gymnastics have got the scores wrong, because they didn’t correctly account for the quality of the Flabbernovsky Dismount, even though that person hasn’t watched a minute of gymnastics for at least the preceding four years, if ever, and previously thought parallel bars was a reference to an architectural feature in a licensed premises. No doubt the relevant TV stations should be breaking limbs in their haste to sign these people up as special commentators as well.

Anyway, the segment that devolved from that premise was a hilarious debacle from whoa to more whoa. Basically they banged on about the chances for “Slumlord Millionaire” or whatever it’s called for winning Best Picture, (actually they supplied no real information about what its chances were, other than you got the impression that they were pretty keen on it winning themselves) and whether Kate Winslet was set to win the award that apparently has been cruelly denied her in the past. (Is there a Best Nice-Looking Actress who Plays a Pleasant Person Oscar now?) You’d never guess that two of the three presenters in this segment were English and that the whole segment was coming out of rain-speckled London. Not ‘arf, anyway.

Then in a nice show of trans-Atlantic balancing, they got onto whether “The Dark Knight” would win some awards, and maybe even “Best Picture”. (And if the entire Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had its brains fall out, that would have to be a top possibility. Mind you, this is apparently not an unprecedented phenomenon, but they’re usually a little more, err, careful these days. I doubt “Iron Man” is getting a Best Picture nomination, for example, although that’s undoubtedly a better picture of the exact same type.)

Continuing on with the drivel-storm, Blonde Stalk and the Cut-Up Crew wondered breathlessly whether Heath Ledger might win a posthumous Oscar for “Dark Knight”. (Well, actually the way they put it was “Dark Knight” winning a posthumous Oscar for Heath Ledger, which is hilarious. The one thing about that movie, technical considerations to one side - and audio mixing considerations so much to one side that they’re way out in the carpark and can’t get access to the building - that might deserve any sort of Oscar is Heath Ledger’s performance, which is also pretty much the only reason that anyone could be thinking for even half a second about it as being worth a Best Picture nomination.)

Isn’t it screamingly obvious to everyone (CNN staff-members drafted in to being instant movie experts not included apparently) that Ledger must be a solid-gold short-priced favourite to win the Oscar, given a showy, attention-grabbing role and performance, and a certain amount of sentiment attached to the fact that he died soon after and very young? The time for speculating at this level whether he might get an award for it was about a year ago, or whenever the movie came out. That’s all a long-standing given that everyone and their pet poodle knows about. Right NOW, what we need is some insider sense of which way the Academy members might be feeling about voting. That would be some sort of update. What this segment gave us was pure semolina.

Mind you, they weren’t too sure about exactly who was in the Academy, or what their function was when it came to these awards. The jolly-joker ass-clown in the suit airily threw out that he felt the critics had far too much say in deciding the awards, and the public didn’t have enough. Apart from the fact that a case could be made that in some regards, the public demonstrably doesn’t know its clacker from its elbow, and the vote they get to make is called “box office”, the critics don’t vote in the Oscars, as such. Members of the Academy do. It’s mentioned in all the Oscars shows, every year, and multiple times. That’s why they’re called “The Academy Awards”.

And, perhaps, just as predictably by now, but they still managed to wow me with this one, the important factor of exactly which category Ledger was nominated in - i.e. Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor, and you could easily make a case either way - was never mentioned once. Mickey Rourke’s chances for winning Best Actor and 100% completing a career turnaround as monumental as Andrew McCarthy’s or Rob Lowe’s, only in reverse, are quite possibly heavily dependent on whether Ledger is nominated in the same category as him, or whether they fudge it the way they did in the Golden Globes, and define Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker as a supporting role. (Which, to be honest, in effect, and design, and promotion, it probably wasn’t.) Just repeating this - CNN, the most authoritative and respected news source in the Milky Way galaxy did a whole segment on likely winners at the Oscars, and omitted to mention at any point exactly which award one of the main chances is nominated for, or even speculate about it, or mention it as an issue at all. Now that’s old school comedy gold.

And the capper - which I bet most of you will see coming now, but I remained blissfully unaware of at the time - despite winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, and every tinpot showbiz cheese-stick perennially saying that the Golden Globes are the most indicative guide to likely winners at the Oscars (which I think is at least partially a demonstrable crock if anyone bothered to check it out and “do the math”, because there are nearly always winners of major Oscars that everyone foofs and splatters on about being a surprise if not a complete shock) neither the movie “The Wrestler”, nor Mickey Rourke were shown or even MENTIONED at any point during this comprehensive guide to the Oscars.

To put this in context, before and after this segment, we’d had literally up-to-the-minute updates on the sentencing of all those charged in the Chinese milk-tainting case, from a guy who was actually ducking in and out of court, and filing via phone from the steps of the court-house south of Beijing, we’d had exclusive footage of the exact extent of the destruction in Gaza, with fairly comprehensive background detail in narration, and interviews with those who’d had their homes destroyed, we’d had weather reports and weather patterns from everywhere from Athens to Berlin to Sydney to blizzardly cold Minneapolis, and summary and updates on what anyone in North America called Obama had done, said, worn, eaten, driven, or frowned over, accompanied by any number of layers of screamingly detailed expert analysis.

And then we get to the bit about the movies, and it’s cue the prop girl or the parking validation lady or whoever’s handy and it’s all systems go for five minutes of Chuckleheads ‘R Us. Someone was embarrassed or circumspect enough that when Blonde Stalk Lady came on, they didn’t even bother with the charade of a graphic announcing her as a movie or showbiz expert. It just somewhat shamefacedly mumbled in print, “CNN Correspondent”.

And why not? It’s movies - we all love those. Anyone can talk about that stuff. Here we have Wretched Wilkins. Well, I think I’ll probably continue to fight the tide and deg to biffer. The thought of consuming a little actual expertise rather than the usual general gruel of pure unsubstantiated opinion and thunderously uninformed verbal confetti doesn’t make me violently ill at the prospect.

As a favourite rock’n'roll band of mine, The Upper Crust, once so sagely and accurately noted:
“Everyone is equal - to a greater or lesser degree.” Although it wasn’t intended as such, when it comes to media folk’s opinionations on popular culture matters, this increasingly seems a searingly accurate commentary.

On a parenthetical, but not entirely unrelated note. The great, dominant principle of Australian life has apparently become “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.” This has become such a borderline matter of near-religious faith here now - at least to knotheads, and maybe a lot more generally than that, when you drink about it - that apparently the worst insult you can give to anyone in Australia these days is to disagree flat-out with someone else’s opinion - even if they clearly know absolutely nothing about the subject matter in question and are talking more bollocks than a urologists convention.

Well, out of that attitude, you get about the level of public debate, media analysis and consequent cultural enrichment that you deserve. Or expressed more bluntly, you’re on a kick in the trousers to nothing.

Put it this way - I have no problem with everyone having a right to their own opinion. I just am more selective about who I want to hear expressing their opinion. In fact, I’d go further in a somewhat frankly fascist sounding direction, and say I don’t think everyone SHOULD have an equal right to express their opinion in a public forum. Some expertise in the subject matter is always a help, I reckon. Yeah, everyone has a right to an opinion, but when a fire breaks out, I reserve the right to ignore yours, the fat-arse pundit on the radio’s and Kelvin from across the road’s. I only want to hear from the guy in the helmet who pulls up in the fire-truck. As the Upper Crust also rightly put it, “Everybody’s equal - some more than others.” Some say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. When it comes to hearing people’s opinions, I’ll happily risk that danger, if the alternative is no knowledge whatsoever.

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More movies I think deserve a little more attention than they probably get these days.

There’s no connecting theme to any of these, except I think they stand out from the general custard of more conventional films, and would strongly suggest to people who love movies that they’re worth a look. All the footnotes in italics are just extra information, and can be skipped if you prefer to get to the next movie in a hurry.

GHOST BREAKERS (1940)

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943)

Despite the name of Bachelor #1 above, these are both zombie movies of a kind, and they’re the kind you could conceivably call the best zombie movies ever made, maybe including the Romero Living Dead pictures.

Ghost Breakers is extremely atmospheric, creates a memorable feeling of creeping unease, and has some decent shocks in it, which is all what you might call unusual for a prime era Bob Hope movie. It has what the horse-racing fraternity would call “serious claims” to being the greatest comedy-horror movie ever made. Hope is in line-exploding form in his alternating coward/hero persona, has great comedy support from Willie Best (who, unforgettably, and not inaccurately, describes himself as “the family detainer”), and if you like your female leads vulnerable, plucky and eye-blearingly lovely in approximately equal doses, I always thought you could do a lot worse than Paulette Goddard at the height of her stardom.

The basic story is that Paulette has inherited a spooky castle somewhere in what Mrs Slocombe from Are You Being Served routinely and authoritatively described as “The Caribbeano”, and Bob, as a fellow shipboard passenger gets drawn into the intrigue against his better judgement, and inherent on-screen inclination towards knee-knocking cowardice and self-preservation. Actually, Hope’s character is slightly less flighty and slightly more a regular leading man than usual in this one, not that gets in the way of the laughs.

Once they disembark, the local atmosphere may not be rigorously authentic, but it has a quietly queasy conviction in its acceptance of the paranormal that heightens the effect of both its scares and its laughs.

I Walked with a Zombie avoids working the comedy side of the street, but goes a step further in its sincere acceptance of voodoo and zombies as a part of the local atmosphere (also in the Caribbeano), in a way that completely gets the audience on side with its intentions from the beginning. It must be one of the least-frenzied in tone of all horror movies, or those of the zombie sub-genre. Much like some others in the series of horror movies Val Lewton produced for RKO at this time and subsequently, in a way it’s more of an extremely engrossing adult fairytale, or strange fantasy, than a more typical genre movie that routinely goes for shock effects. It’s kind of an “acting-out” of various irrational bits of psychology we retain as adults, despite our better intentions, in a way. (Curse of the Cat People more unambiguously pursues this approach, but is also oriented more to a child’s eye perspective, as it features a juvenile central character.)

In terms of maintaining both tone and atmosphere, director Jacques Tourneur did a great, and unforgettable, job here. It’s a movie that will stay with you.

Ghost Breakers is more pure entertainment, but as such, also a great picture. It’s probably the best one in the long, loooong career of director George Marshall.

(So as not to leave out the usual annotative folderol on these movies, in case anyone hasn’t come across them before, I Walked with a Zombie is allegedly loosely based on the novel Jane Eyre. I’m not completely convinced this was what Charlotte Bronte had in mind during the planning stages, but I imagine Shakespeare would have also got a bit of a shock if he’d ever found out The Tempest would turn out in the movies as Forbidden Planet. Let alone had he witnessed the famous musical adaptation of Hamlet, (incorporating musical themes from Bizet’s famous opera, The Geelong Football Club Theme Song), as staged by the noted theatrical impresario Harold Hecuba (Phil Silvers) in an episode of Gilligan’s Island.
On a slightly less lofty cultural note, Ghost Breakers was later remade as the Martin and Lewis comedy, Scared Stiff, with the same director, George Marshall, in charge.)

UNMAN, WITTERING AND ZIGO (1971)

If you needed one, here’s a movie about a teacher and his pupils that could be considered the ultimate anti-Mr Chips.

Perennial slightly withdrawn everyman of many somewhat off-kilter movies of the time, David Hemmings, comes to teach at a private school, but there seems some degree of mystery as to exactly what happened to his predecessor, and he starts to get the strong impression that the boys may have had something to do with it, and if he doesn’t let his class proceed in the manner they see fit, the same kind of thing might happen to him.

The kind of tricksy plotty nasty suspense movie of the time (there was one called Games, a few others just as obscure in vaguely the same vein, and sub-branches like the psycho-whodunnit Sleuth, and later a Sleuth knock-off called Deathtrap) that plays with its food a bit, in terms of running its characters and viewers through various devious and somewhat sadistic obstacle courses. While it’s a little repetitive, and wouldn’t have lost anything taking the tailor’s shears to the running time, it does hold the attention, and gets a good head of the creeps going.

It’s kind of a combination of the ritualistic, inexplicable atmosphere of something like the original The Wicker Man, combined with elements of If and Village of the Damned. It’s not as sustained or involving as The Wicker Man, but it stands out from the pack nearly as well, and on the rare occasions it surfaces, you should take the opportunity to see it. The credits on IMDB.com suggest it was based on a stage-play. I have a feeling that the audience members probably didn’t exactly leave the theatre snapping their fingers and whistling the tunes.

THE END (1974)

Definitely the odd one out in Burt Reynolds’ run of starring pictures in the early-mid 70s, and for such an oddball black comedy, surprisingly little known. Reynolds has a terminal illness, and hires an insane guy to kill him (Dom DeLuise, at his most characteristically unhinged). Reynolds then changes his mind, but can’t convince DeLuise, who keeps trying to kill him. Sends up just about everything conventional in contemporary-set relationship pictures of the time, and Reynolds’ own movie persona of the time. To say it’s uneven in the quality of the gags and pacing is a gross understatement, but it probably wins out on sheer giddiness and idiocy. Reynolds, as director, did a pretty fair job of maintaining an unusual comic tone. Even by the standards of his Mel Brooks movie appearances, DeLuise is completely out to lunch here. This is the movie in which he tellingly reveals that he had to kill his own father, because he was, and I quote, “Sooooo Polish.”

(I’ve read a story or two that Woody Allen was initially offered this movie before Reynolds picked it up.

Apart from the fact that, in the 70s, Woody Allen hardly ever appeared in a movie he didn’t write or direct, (the only exceptions I’m aware of are Play It Again, Sam, a Woody Allen-starring movie directed by Herbert Ross, written by Allen from his own play; and The Front, a great movie neither written nor directed by him in which he also starred, but the evidence of the movie strongly suggests he had a hand in his own dialogue), this just wouldn’t have particularly suited him. It’s a scenario which kind of demands someone who looks as though they might not have been a squirrelly neurotic mess before the events of the movie started up, and the latter was Allen’s regular on-screen characterisation of the time. It would have been interesting had he directed it, though.)

BACKROADS (1977)

Probably the most underrated Australian movie there is. (There sure aren’t too many of those.) I’d say it was one of the two or three best ever made here.

Road movie featuring Bill Hunter and Gary Foley (yeah, the guy who became an Aboriginal activist down the track) and the various types and attitudes they strike, with some crime along the way. It depicts a baseline of Australian language, behaviour and humour that’s rugged (tending to rough as guts) which was rarely presented as such in the movies of the time. (The earlier Wake in Fright emphatically excepted.) It’s dynamic, quick as hell (an hour sees Backroads out), and has a lot of raw material in there, in both a thematic sense and pretty much all other senses as well.

Elements of racial tension are kind of presented “as found”, i.e. treated kind of naturalistically, rather than being heavily punched up or dwelled upon, but that’s in the picture too, for sure. One of their travelling companions along the way is Julie McGregor, the same one who played Betty in Hey, Dad, although I daresay she might prefer to be remembered for this performance. Hunter is alternately blustering and taciturn, all believable Aussie working class guy of the time, with a hint of a heart, and Foley is also really good as his slightly more shrewd road partner.

Phil Noyce did a pretty great job with this. You can smell the sweat, taste the grit, and it feels like the truth.

THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1991)

Stuart Gordon is generally remembered, if at all, for his stylishly sick, somewhat showy and stunty, but highly entertaining H.P. Lovecraft “expansion” Re-Animator (1985). He should be remembered for this rather more painstaking, but ultimately just as grabby adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum. An unambiguously Italianate horror movie with an interesting mix of human grotesques and a determinedly historical dwelling on aspects of the Inquisition, Gordon’s Pit, like the better Corman adaptations of the past, captures the chilling or grisly essence of the Poe story (if not the detail), and elaborates in a way that adds to the atmosphere and effect, (remember, those were SHORT stories), in this case using a backdrop of surprisingly convincing and thorough Catholic Church political intrigue. The performances are probably better than you’d expect too, particularly Oliver Reed in one of his best, in a supporting role. Very solid and unusual horror movie.

THE BLACK CAT (1933)

One of the few 30s horror movies that’s still actually scary at all, not to mention pretty darn gruesome, albeit not in a graphic manner, given the times. Edgar Ulmer directed this pretty dark, sometimes black-humoured, and slightly malevolent rumination on the unquenchably violent and irrational sides of human nature. The fatalistic “between wars” feel of the picture is no accident, as witnessed by Boris Karloff’s castle being built on grounds covering the bones of thousands. Karloff is perhaps the most purely evil heel in horror movies, heading a Satanic cult (apparently because he can) with every formality of pleasantry possible, and approximately no morals whatsoever. Bela Lugosi as the hero (!) is as humourless, pitiless, and uncorrupted by any hint of humanity as any horror movie good guy yet seen. Next to him, Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing character is a twinkly eyed loveable cove who’s a complete bucket of laughs. (Actually, the only funny thing about Bela’s character is its name – Dr Vitus Verdegast. I always get a laugh out of that one. It sounds like some sort of herbal dietary supplement.)

Not diminished by extremely stylish visuals which have a lot more in common with the German silent expressionist movies than most of the Universal horror pictures, The Black Cat gives off a tremendous whiff of humankind hoist on its own petard – a haunting by the past which will see violence return to triumph again and again. Fittingly it’s one of the few horror movies of the time in which all the monsters are human. From memory, it claims in the opening credits to be based on the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name. Rest assured it has about as much to do with Edgar Allan Poe as King Kong has with Donkey Kong.

HISTORY OF THE WORLD PT 1 (1981)

Probably the last solid Mel Brooks picture, and now somewhat forgotten, underrated, and probably completely misunderstood. This is a revisionist movie, in which all world history (well bits thereof, but it’s a broad enough canvas, and could you just go along with the gag) is recast as old-fashioned, gag-heavy vaudeville of the old school. If you watch it at home, without an audience around, you can even see where he left the pauses for the laughs, i.e. as stage performers working a live audience would.

Conceptually, it’s kind of a bold, not to mention winningly cracked idea, and, in execution, I think he gets the boot into most of it. Memorable moments include Sid Caesar doing some pretty funny pantomime stuff as a caveman (Brooks was a writer on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows in the 50s – also firmly in the vaudeville tradition), Dom DeLuise’s hilariously vulgar turn as Emperor Nero (with support – and that’s some support – from Madeleine Kahn, to me the flat-out funniest of comic actresses, along with Cloris Leachman), the Spanish Inquisition musical production number, the trailers for upcoming films (Jews in Space is a favourite there), and the French Revolution sequence, containing both Brooks himself (“It’s GOOD to be the King”) and Harvey Korman’s misadventures with the servant responsible for the urine receptacle (“Wait for the shake.”)

Old-fashioned farce taken in, when you think about it, a pretty original and sly direction – a complete burlesque on mankind’s history has a certain audacity to it – studded with gags and performers who really know how to handle this kind of material. On the downside, not all the gags are great, some sequences drag a little, it lacks the goofy cohesion-generated goodwill of Brooks’ “story” pictures like Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, and the handling of some transitional material is a little starchy if not sloppy. (And some of the folks in minor roles, particularly the effective “chorus girls” are no great actors.) But on set-piece stuff alone, it gets there, there are killer incidental gags around as well, and the basic concept is, ultimately, effectively unifying, even if it kind of peters out rather than ends. Now that it’s most likely playing in people’s homes rather than theatres, it might be able to stand a quick edit to tighten up some of those laughter-pauses, and maybe shave some of the dodgier transitional stuff as well, but it’s very funny just as it is.

MR ARKADIN (1955)

Another underrated Orson Welles picture, in this case, probably partly because there’s nothing surviving that is anything like a definitive “director’s intention” version of a final print, and it’s at least questionable, based on both the evidence of the film as it survives, and the way he was working then – on bits and pieces of money, and scrips and scraps of film stock, shooting stuff when he could – that he ever even shot everything he had in mind for the movie. (Even if he did, any idea of a comprehensive Welles-supervised post-production or director’s edit basically never happened.)

That said, it still works for what it is, and stands out as being a lot more intriguing and entertaining than some of the better regarded Welles films, and arguably sticks closer to some of his central concerns as a movie-maker as well.

It’s a little bit of a Citizen Kane in double-reverse, in a way. It’s about a very well known European millionaire (Arkadin, played by Welles) with a mysterious past. An adventurer/ne’er-do-well type gets tangentially involved with Arkadin’s (less well known) business, falls for Arkadin’s daughter, and is then hired by the tycoon to investigate his own past, which Arkadin claims not to remember.

It also recalls the structure of Citizen Kane with a wink and a twist, starting with a fatal air-crash, and being narrated by one of those involved with it, in retrospect.

You don’t have to look any further than that to see Welles, as director, playing with the very forms he established, and Welles, as showman, playing Arkadin, teasing us to get hooked in his farmyard combination of shaggy dog story and wild goose chase.

Whatever it doesn’t have (a decent lead – the main actor’s a bit of a brick – and a certain sense of completion, given some of the lurches and jolts occasioned by the non-existence of transitional material), it has some fantastic, full-flavoured individual sequences enlivened by some memorably fanciful performances in character roles (Michael Redgrave is the unquestionable stand-out, as the cheerfully cracked proprietor of a bric-a-brac store that looks more like the indoors version of the local tip, but Akim Tamaroff and Mischa Auer are very enjoyable as well.) Welles’ own performance is one of his most enjoyable as well – an endearing piece of sly showbiz flim-flammery steeled judiciously with the right amount of menace when necessary.

Actually, even in the chopped-liver public domain version I first saw, it entertained and stood out as a movie with a unique take on human corruption, and something of a mordant examination of post-WWII Europe. There’s more than an element of Citizen Kane meets The Third Man about it. That’s not a bad element to be hanging around with, when you think about it.

[If you want to see all there is to see of this movie, strip-mine the bank-balance, and purchase the Criterion Collection version, The Complete Mr Arkadin. This contains 3 separate DVDs, all versions of the one film – the originally released Spanish language version of the movie, (which was edited after Welles left the project), the later worldwide release version entitled Confidential Report, (which accompanying notes suggests Welles had a hand in editing) and a further version Criterion put together themselves, which runs about quarter of an hour longer than the others, and presumably includes any surviving material that the others had left out. Bearing in mind that we have very little idea exactly what Welles would or wouldn’t have wanted to leave out.)

He might well have appreciated the irony that the mystery at the centre of the movie’s story is the character “Mr Arkadin”, whereas the mystery at the centre of the movie as a movie is either the movie itself, or to look at it another way, Orson Welles. Alternatively, he may have just preferred to have enough money and support to be able to finish Mr Arkadin.]

THE 7 FACES OF DR LAO (1964)

Of all the timeless “children’s movies that also appeal to adults” this is perhaps the least known and remembered of the really good ones. The expression in quotation marks in the previous sentence is an approximation tending towards sales pitch, incidentally – what we really mean when we say that is movies that pull out the rug of rationality, and jolt adults (in a pleasant manner, if you can jolt in a pleasant manner) back into a child’s way of seeing the world. That’s the magic of movies like The Wizard of Oz, or the Disney Snow White, or whatever. *

A circus comes to town late in the days of the old West. A sly dog of a cynical, wealthy rancher type (Arthur O’Connell – the kind of character actor who’s been in approximately half of everything, who you know by face rather than name, but this may be his best role) is trying to buy up the whole town, because the railroad is coming through, or whatever this week’s variant on that standard plotline is. The townspeople themselves are easily manipulated – unprincipled, money-obsessed, tired and jaded.

Pitted against him is the idealistic newspaper guy played as a likeable but characterless bedsheet by John Ericson, whose love interest in slow development is the local schoolmarm type (Barbara Eden, still strangely off-kilter and sexy as heck draped in the latest season’s hairline-to-toenail gingham fashion) who has a young son, thank the good Lord, or we’d never get all this story out of the way and get on with the movie.

Anyway, the minute the circus has pitched its tents, Dr Lao (pron. “Low”, played by Tony Randall) hits town and starts mystifying the inhabitants with some unusual, and perhaps supernatural, feats and a fair amount of comedy double-talk, and in particular young Son of Eden (Kevin Tate).

It transpires that Dr Lao’s circus is really more of a series of carnival sideshows, featuring various curiosities of history (Merlin the Magician, the Abominable Snowman, Medusa, Pan, a snake with the face of Arthur O’Connell etc.) In each case when the individual townsfolk confront one of them, they learn something about themselves, and not necessarily something pleasant or anything they wanted to learn.

Meanwhile Dr Lao is trying to teach the wonder of real life to the young kid, and the plot-thread about Arthur O’Connell trying to buy out the whole town (partly to prove his own sour opinion about human nature) grinds inexorably on.

Tony Randall is the soul of the movie, as the snappy, quirky, unreadable Dr Lao. The way he and his circus is “played” in the movie – it’s never quite made 100% clear how much is supernatural and how much is pure touring show charlatanism, at least not until fairly late on – is essential to what makes The 7 Faces of Dr Lao work so well.

However, the real magic that makes the movie work is Tony Randall, who plays each and every one of the sideshow exhibits (and, out of make-up, a cameo as an audience member at one point) and for all he’s been great in other things, this is his stand-out performance/s. He’s funny, and chilling, and tragic, and all at the same time, and you pretty much just have to see the movie for that, although it’s the story derived from Charles G. Finney’s novel, and Charles Beaumont’s impeccably judged screenplay adaptation, and George Pal’s direction which provide the apt context that takes this from being a vehicle for a great performance, to a resonant parable about the wonder inherent in life, if not what makes life worth living.

It’s a show which says life is more fantastic than showbiz, about a show which says life is more fantastic than showbiz. It’s an unusually sophisticated mechanism for a fantasy kids’ movie to put it mildly.

George Pal was renowned for his stop-motion animation shorts the Puppetoons before he came to feature pictures, and this movie contains an unusually apt blend of the European coldness and fantastic nature of those with a more humanistic viewpoint. Thanks to the life Tony Randall brings to it, it has humour and spark to balance out the somewhat stark and cold viewpoint here and there, and visual effects which are probably somewhat clunky by computer-era FX standards, but still convincing/effective in context, and somewhat scary from a kids’ perspective. (The special make-up effects by veteran William Tuttle – who won a special Oscar for his trouble – are also off their chops.)

It’s a difficult film to know how to categorise, which actually speaks volumes for it. In a way, it’s The Wizard of Oz in reverse – this time Oz comes to Kansas. In another way, it’s the most unusual Western ever made, possibly including The Valley of Gwangi, which had dinosaurs in it.

All you need to know is, out of the thirteen or so billion movies that people claim have magic to them, this is one of the couple of hundred that actually do. It’s really something. Even if that child’s view of the world stuff means nothing to you at all, because life has beaten you around the head until you ARE one of those pudding-like townsfolk depicted in the movie (and after a certain amount of Boxing Day sales spent on the planetary surface, we all probably are to a greater or lesser extent) still see this for the seven or eight Tony Randall performances. And then you can thank me later.

* (Actually, I’d put Terry Gilliam’s The Time Bandits in there as well – another somewhat unappreciated movie in this area, although not as forgotten as The 7 Faces of Dr Lao.)

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Every year in his increasingly mountainous Movie Guide, Leonard Maltin puts a list, somewhere near in to the front cover, of 50 worthy movies that were either recent ones that somehow slipped through to the ‘keeper, or older features that he feels the ceaseless bludgeoning of the passing decades might have contrived to obscure from the notice of the moviegoers of today.

His choices are endearingly eccentric – anyone trying to push the Ritz Bros version of The Three Musketeers from 1939 to contemporary viewers has an idiosyncratic approach to the broader sweep of cinema and changing tastes therein verging on the heroic – but usually valid, and often extremely helpful.

An enormous weight of moviedom’s past and present resides in the half-assed, the hopeless, the tedious, the time-passers, and mostly, the evergreen avalanche of the witlessly conventional. Practically speaking, that’s most of the movies ever made.

Finding the movies that stand out, that create and sustain their own little movie “world” – whether that’s another world in a fantasy or science-fiction sense, i.e. a literal “other world”, or a more subtle one created by selective use of the visual arsenal of movie story-telling, or unusual characterisation, or quirks of dialogue, or all of the above, kind of what the 60s French critics meant by “mise-en-scene” (which IS movies, from one philosophical standpoint – it’s what you put in the camera and on the soundtrack, by framing, shooting, style of shooting, editing, design, etc etc, and just as much, what you leave out, that makes a particular movie that movie, that changes it from the world we hang about and consume lasagne in, to the world of that particular film) – well, that’s the challenge. There’s a lot less of those.

Incidentally this is the difference between Leonard Maltin and so many other compilers, short review anthologists, short order cooks, industry loiterers, buffs and alleged critics – he loves the movies, and he wants to share that love with anyone who’s open to “getting” something a little off the beaten track. For all his chipmunkish bubbling enthusiasm, and mainstream Hollywood narrative tendencies, he’s always made time for the off-kilter, expressive little movies that hoed their own row, and, while he’s no kneejerk olden days dweller who reviles the new and mainstream, he’s always had a keen appreciation of movie history, and refuses to fall for the standard mainstream media barbarism when it comes to popular culture about the latest automatically being the greatest.

His ongoing “50 More Films You May Have Missed” is such a good, useful idea that there’s virtually nothing I can do to improve on it. Instead, I’m just going to copy the idea, and make it 10 rather than 50, so as not to clog the interweb to a standstill; so I can stretch out a little and tell you why I like these stray dawgies and why you might want to see ’em; and also because this is something I intend to do again every so often (best to be warned), rather than once a year, so I don’t have any particular need to drop 50 in one hit.

I’ve mentioned before my weariness over lists/books/decorative paperweights of “1000 Great Movies You Must See Before You Croak”. Apart from endlessly ploughing over the same movies again and again, often with little in the way of descriptive or analytical verbiage that would help anyone unfamiliar with the movies chosen to have the vaguest clue why they were chosen, the other major monkey wrench in the gear assembly is that they even more often deliver a substantial proportion of movies choices inclining you to believe that the book should have been called “1000 Movies That You Must See To Make You Feel Happier About Dying”. Be warned that coffee table books usually choose coffee table movies, and in the end result you’d probably be better off using the thing as a coffee table rather than reading it.

(Any prevalence of the name Peter Greenaway in these might be something of a tell-tale sign, I’d be suggesting, and if they’ve loaded up for bear on Jim Jarmusch and Hal Hartley as well, then figuratively speaking, they’ve pretty much given up on bobbing for apples, they’ve dived directly into the barrel, and if you’re not careful, it’s probably your turn in the barrel next.)

Anyway, I’ve picked movies that I think stand out in some way, either hold up as pure entertainment, or convincingly retain their own little movie world for the duration, seasoned with a few movies that I think are lost classics, and others that are somewhat familiar to people (or even reasonably well-known) that deserve more acclaim than they’ve generally received.

As with the Maltin 50 list, not all of these are represented as great movies, but some are, and all others, presuming you have a susceptibility to the relevant genre or style, should at least be worth the time spent to view them.

The one main difference from the Maltin list is that I’ll do plenty of sloppy sentence-painting regarding each movie, something that Lenny can’t do with his list, because the remainder of each new edition of his Movie Guide already threatens the available publishing technology of perfect binding, and weighs slightly more than the sturdiest house-brick, if not houseboat. I think if he put in even ten more pages than he does now, what you’d have when you got home would amount to a sheet of colourful cardboard cover material, a few pieces of shattered dried glue, and around 1700 loose-leaf sheets of printed paper.

The following movies are, like Paris Hilton’s brain cells, in no particular order whatsoever.

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Herk Harvey’s accidental arthouse piece is one of the few movies to successfully capture the logic of a dream and sustain it. It’s kind of a ghost story, kind of a horror movie, and pretty much unlike almost any example of either that you could think of. Unforgettable visual use of an abandoned amusement park floating in the middle of Farmland, USA – a bizarre piece of creepy visual poetry about capitalism gone to seed that you won’t shake in a hurry. The elements of very ordinary period JD movie, codswallop melodrama and some highly amateur theatrics can be safely and easily ignored to get to the greater glories herein. Some scenes clearly prefigure similar visual ideas in Night of the Living Dead.

The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977)

Of all the side projects by Mel Brooks henchmen in the 70s, this one probably got closest to the mark. Inconsistent but often wild and hilarious movie genre parody in the mode of Brooks’ 70s work, featuring Marty Feldman and Michael York as twin brothers, many years before Twins with Schwarzenegger and DeVito. Watch (and listen) for the opening song/march, a nice black-and-white silent bit with Feldman doing his darnedest to miss out on escaping from a prison while the jailers are actually trying to help him get out, tons and tons of wild gags, Spike Milligan as a hopelessly senile butler (the calendar gag’s a beauty) and some funny send-ups of Foreign Legion movie clichés. Very deep, solid cast. Inconsistent in pacing and everything else, but cheerfully bent-headed enough to earn your indulgence. Almost certainly the best thing Ann-Margaret ever did on film, for what that’s worth. Marty Feldman was a very funny man.

Rock All Night (1955)

Nominal rock’n’roll exploitation pic is actually typical of Roger Corman’s work of the time (mid 50s to mid 60s) – highly formal, Shakespearean structured and toned elemental drama, with an Old Testament flavour of “an eye for an eye” and “What ye sow, so shall ye reap”. Often these added to the feel of foreshadowing and fatalism by telling the entire story in line illustrations behind the opening credits. And just as much disguised this (particularly to the less observant and more kneejerk ‘anti-trash’ critics) by so obviously being teen exploitation movies, aided by hilariously varying levels of performance, and a decent smattering of dialogue that seemed to come straight off the writer’s shirt-cuff following a quick lavatory break. One-hour meditation on heroism and villainy barrages its way towards an inevitable conclusion, interrupted by an astonishing number of breaks (in a one-hour movie!) for some of the least successful rock’n’roll acts of the era, and also the Platters singing a couple of their most steadfastly chart-resistant non-hits. The perfect Corman actor, Dick Miller, takes the James Dean/Montgomery Clift type role, which isn’t exactly a perfect fit, but it’s certainly an interesting tussle, and speaking of casting innovation, Russell Johnson, the Professor from Gilligan’s Island, plays a crazed killer on the run. You kind of have to see this one.

The Host (2006)

When you’re tired of industry pimps and friends alike assuring you that the latest megaplex fodder is the all-action, waahlld and creezy, armchair rollercoaster ride of the century you’ve been waiting for, and it turns out to be more flattened popcorn on a screen that took 130 minutes out of your life, move up to real smokin’ pleasure, and get a hold of this animal. I hate those kind of megaplex, everything explodes, “Bruce Willis (or fill in modern day equivalent), beats up all the bad guys, gets the girl, there’s 38 unrelated climaxes, then let’s roll the feelgood dance toon/wannabe hit ballad over the closing credits” type identikit ‘action blockbuster’ movies more than anyone, and I’m telling you this one’s a barnburner. It’s a Korean monster movie (with a fantastic effects monster you won’t be forgetting in a hurry – part dinosaur, part the creature from Alien), it’s also a character study of a particularly unusual dysfunctional family, (why would I make this stuff up?), and also a political satire about the South Korean government’s indifference to its citizens’ welfare and kowtowing to the US government on everything, as well as about the US government’s absolute indifference to the welfare of South Korea and Koreans in general. There are some monument-sized epic Russian novels that would look at that list and say, “Say, that’s a fair amount of thematic material you got there for an action picture, little buddy.”

Tons of suspense, jolting moments of shock-horror, and an off-kilter approach to characterisation and storytelling that seeds a great deal of style through an already flavoursome combination of ideas. Great effects too. It’s nonsensical at times, flags at others, but what movie of this kind doesn’t do those things, and this has got so much more going on than most of them, and mostly earns its two-hour length. Also, it leaves you with an aftertaste of movie, rather than just popcorn wedged in your teeth.

That’ll Be the Day (1974)

First of two now virtually forgotten English movies telling the story about a daydream-inclined working class kid (played by David Essex, pop star of the time) who becomes a rock’n’roll star and then finds out that getting everything you’d hoped for is a great deal less enjoyable than the trip to get there in the first place. Not coincidentally, something of a de facto history/commentary on the development of rock music, and rock stars, as an industry. This first movie grabs an incredible flavour of the time and place – the big hall dances, scuzzy carnivals, and ‘orrible English holiday camps of the early-mid 60s. Ringo Starr is just fantastic, and very funny, as Essex’s sex-obsessed (and then some) more experienced carnie mate, and, among a smattering of then-faded 60s British pop heroes, Keith Moon has a stand-out, unforgettable turn as a recalcitrant drummer (so not a stretch in the casting there.)

The second movie, Stardust (1975) sees the Essex character retreat into indulgence and drugs, both isolated and insulated by the hero worship of his fans, and is a lot less fun, but no less involving, credible and telling about its nominally secondary subject, the music, and what happened to it. Generally the reference is said to be to John Lennon, but it is just as much if not more the story of a Syd Barrett or a Peter Green, and in general it’s the direction of the music and the industry under examination rather than any one real-life figure. In keeping with the more sobering nature of the enterprise, Ringo Starr’s character is played by 60s pop star Adam Faith in the sequel, and while he isn’t remotely funny, he’s good, and the point of the movie is that somewhere, somehow, the humour and spontaneity drained away. Whether or not you agree with the point of view, they’re both movies of great conviction in their ideas, and two of the best movies ever about rock’n’roll/rock music. If there’s a significant weakness, it might be David Essex in the lead, but I think he just about gets away with it on charm (and a lot of help) in Movie 1, and is better suited to Movie 2.

The Three Musketeers/The Four Musketeers (1973/4)

The first movie is a rollicker, a costume action movie that moves, with more than an edge of parody, plenty of physical comedy that nudges playfully at the clichés of the genre (somewhat akin to the Monty Python and the Holy Grail/Jabberwocky approach, but a little less overt about it), good use of the Dumas political sub-plots and characterisation to set up the set-pieces, stocked to a ridiculous degree with quality actors, and some who have probably never been better than they were in this and the sequel.

The Four Musketeers (shot at the same time, but a clearly distinct movie in style and approach) is more openly revisionist, and also more sour, if not emphatically downbeat. Richard Lester, as a director of mainstream movies, always seemed to have lingering question marks about the effectiveness, if not the actual possibility, of pure heroism. In movies like this and his version of the Robin Hood legend, Robin and Marian (1976), he anticipated the revisionist approach to superheroes in comics in the 1980s, and movies in the 90s and the current decade. It’s not as much pure fun as the first one, but just as impressive in its way.

Cuba (1979)

Richard Lester’s great “lost” movie (which isn’t so much “lost”, in the sense of being unavailable, as it is a case of nobody ever quite getting around to finding it) is an action/adventure/romance set in Cuba at the time of the Batista regime’s downfall. Well, that’s one thing that it does well, but a long way from the whole story. A rather shadowy diplomat/adventurer type, Major Dapes, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a James Bond type figure, particularly in that he’s played by Sean Connery, tries to make such political, financial and romantic capital as he can out of the general chaos of the time, and the point that can’t really escape the attention of all but the most determinedly ostrich-like viewer, is that the grim British pluck and do-goodery of, well, the James Bond type, is a complete anachronism in the dawning of a new political world. One of the most memorable contrasts between this movie’s reality and the heroic templates of the past, is an unforgettable scene of Batista, the falling emperor, sitting in his darkened palace as his dictatorship disintegrates outside, watching as a projector plays the great climactic action set-piece from Terence Fisher’s The Horror of Dracula, where Peter Cushing as Van Helsing grimly swashes and buckles his icily pure way to victory over Christopher Lee’s snarling, ee-vill Count. It’s an action movie (of sorts) that comments on action movies, (also with Lester’s trademark anti-heroic slapstick humour of inconvenience, and some of his best character-comedy stock cast, like Denholm Elliott and Jack Weston, are there to get the job done). The idea that James Bond, and the heroic notions represented by such a character/approach were inherently out of date by the time of their introduction is one hell of an interesting notion for a movie, and it’s all pulled off so well here on all levels. I’m not necessarily saying it’s a great movie, but Cuba deserves so much more attention than it’s had in a long, long time, and probably ever.

The Immortal Story (1968)

Orson Welles spins a salty sailor’s yarn about the love’s timeless tawdry eternal triangle, and finds the magic to make it both epic – we feel the tale is elemental and will go on forever, but not in a Peter Jackson’s King Kong kind of way – and personal enough to bite and sting. Welles was always strong on picaresque old school adventurer’s yarns (Lady from Shanghai, Mr Arkadin) and here he reaches to transform one of these into something mythic, and – you should pardon my less-than-mythic phrasing – belts ’er right out of the ballpark. A relatively little known one-hour slice of Welles so clearly superior to many of his better-known and over-touted “classics” (not a reference to Citizen Kane, I lurch to insert) that it’s slighting amounts to an insult. In the interest of avoiding ambiguity, I’ll just say that, even though it’s not necessarily for everybody, at 63 minutes or not, this IS a great movie.

This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse (1966)

Aaaand, this would NOT be a great movie. Part of Brazilian director Jose Mojica Marins’ fitful Coffin Joe series of truly Professor Wacko horror movies, this was the second one, and as commendably pathological as the horror movie has become in more recent times, this one still manages to stand out from the crowd down at the soda shop. If Luis Bunuel was the famously iconoclastic anti-religion, anti-clerical mainstream movie director (well, critically mainstream, you could say, at any rate), then Sergio Leone showed the odd sign of something similar in spaghetti westerns (check out A Fistful of Dynamite aka Duck, You Sucker) and Jose Mojica Marins (Coffin Joe himself – he plays the lead role, and come to think of it, it’s pretty easy to believe he IS Coffin Joe) was the Bunuel of the horror movie.

For a movie that spends so much time being downright pathological, with real live spiders and snakes draped over underdressed women all over the shop, gruelling misanthropic and/or misogynist torture scenes (it’s a few from from Column A, a couple from Column B), and crazy gore all over the estate and running down the back of your grandma’s paisley shawl, it’s also strangely PRINCIPLED, both in terms of its creepy lead character’s motivation, and in terms of what its director is clearly saying through his movie. He believes religion – or at least the Catholic religious mainstream of his country – is a dangerous lie, and even further a complete corruption of life, and the only hope for the future is the children, and a kind of ascetic purity of thought shared by him and the “ideal woman” he will find to mate with (thus sewing the seeds for a new race of hope, or something in that regard) once he’s, err, eliminated all the not-so-worthy candidates from the selection of potential brides he’s kidnapped all of, via the usual purification methods of torture, snakes and big hairy tarantulas.

Man alive – is this some wacked-out movie by any genre’s standards.

However, in between some continuity slapstick and acting that varies from pure teak to amateur hamhocks akimbo, there’s some highly atmospheric black-and-white shooting, and a couple of memorable set-pieces. There’s also a bizarre Wizard of Oz-in-reverse trip to Hell taken by the main character, which is depicted, unlike the rest of this black-and-white movie, in vivid Splaturate-Color, and captures a heady combination of Dante, Bosch (the painter, not the power-tool manufacturer), the opening scenes of Olsen and Johnson’s comedy Hellzapoppin, and mostly, Sid and Marty Krofft’s H.R. Pufnstuf, had that been set in Hell rather than on a polystyrene island.

Everything about this movie is unique, I’ll say that for it. Marins has since bitterly regretted the scene at the end where Coffin Joe recants – something forced upon him to get the movie released under the oppressive regime of the time. There’s two reasons he shouldn’t sweat this point. One is, it’s so mind-rippingly obviously at odds with the orientation of the rest of the movie, that everyone short of Richard Wilkins’s hairstyle will instantly realise it’s bogus, and completely at odds with the director’s intention. Secondly, given the remainder of the content, combined with the anti-God/anti-religion polemics, I doubt there was a country in the world where he could have got it released in the unexpurgated, originally intended form in 1966. He might have been struggling a little in 1976 as well.

Schlock (1971)

Unremittingly goofball parody of horror movies, specifically monster movies, which plays slapstick volleyball with the generic expectations in a way quite in tune with the Mel Brooks and Woody Allen movies of the time (although this is a lot more low-rent) and sketch movies like Landis’ own Kentucky Fried Movie; and also nudges/comments on the conventions of those movies in a manner strangely prescient when compared to something like the much later Scream series of movies by Wes Craven.

Landis, in a kind of self-deprecating but strangely dismissive way, kind of almost disowns this movie completely in the commentary track that comes on the DVD release version. He seems to think its eccentricities and bizarre running gags are wilful and exclusive, rather than good movie-making and inclusive. I think he protests too much, and I think that all the inexplicable nutball stuff in there is great. I loved it when I was one of the few to see it on its initial movie release here (I’m pretty sure that was 1974) and followed it on its hiccupy, fitful, occasional later movie screenings. (On a truly inexplicable, money-flushing, all-obscure-horror movie bill at the Palais Theatre, of all places, around ’77, and very rarely revived after that, until a fleeting, barely noticeable videotape release, and ultimately to be saved by the great goalkeeper of virtually every image ever to be recorded to celluloid, the DVD).

Basically the story is, there’s some sort of missing link ape creature on the loose, ripping people apart like a strong man convention that’s got hold of a motherlode of telephone books. This is the excuse to hang a bunch of gags about horror movies on. There’s your story. There’s some King Kong parody in there, 50s trash science-fiction and horror exploitation movies, one unforgettable scene sends up 2001: A Space Odyssey, and there’s a scene which has nothing to do with any pre-existing horror movie where a Jose Feliciano blind musician type is playing boogie piano in a dive of a bar, Schlock comes in, the guy can’t see that he’s a monster, and they end up playing a spirited stride piano duet together. If you can’t manage a laugh over that scene, it’s pretty much time to crank up the defibrillator.

The scene where Schlock ends up looking after a little kid while they’re both at a Saturday afternoon monster movie double feature is a complete cack from beginning to end. It does get repetitive, it isn’t exactly tuned to Formula One levels in terms of any sense of pacing, and it does have its share of relative dud gags, but then, it’s got so many. If you liked Landis’ later motorised slapstick work with huge inept police car chases and the like in 1941 and The Blues Brothers, there’s a bonus for you here in that he arguably does it as well and funnier, with about two or three cars, on all of a rigorous $5 budget. Landis, who has shown himself to be a talented physical comedian in his occasional appearances on screen in later movies, is a hoot in the Rick Baker designed gorilla suit, playing Schlock himself.

Do not expect a ceaseless laugh riot or a great comedy movie, and there is every chance you’ll come away from Schlock enjoying a ton of gags and its unique oddball tone. If they made those generic Scary/Date/Epic/Utterly Hopeless Movie movies with a vaguely commensurate amount of knot-headed flair and genuine laughs, it might even be safe to go back to the megaplexes again. PS: They don’t, and it isn’t.

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