The Barney-Buster postulate

This blog is starting to read like the obit page. But I must give this man his due.

When I auditioned for the role of the buffoon constable Dogberry in a college production of Much Ado About Nothing, the director gave me two words of direction: “Barney Fife.”

Don Knotts was a hero. Without him, The Andy Griffith Show would never have gotten out of the gate. Three's Company would never have survived the mid-series departures of three of its five stars. The Apple Dumpling Gang would never have ridden, nor ridden again. And the Nazis would have won the war. (“Das boot? Nien! Das Limpet!”)

Knotts's bread and butter, of course, were his nervous twitches and facial contortions, which overshadow the fact that he also had a fantastic stone face:











Which is why I've long felt that Knotts could have played Buster Keaton in a heartbeat. Keaton's deadpan was never a sign of passivity — it was containment. There were tremendous energies bottled up in him, trying to force their way out. And when Don Knotts held a straight face (in his case, usually under duress or extreme confusion) you could sense that he was trying very, very hard not to explode.

Both Keaton and Knotts were reactive comedians, though Knotts was usually overreactive. For him to play Keaton's style of contained reaction (done almost entirely with the eyes — see also Paul Giamatti in Sideways) would have been out of his oeuvre, but easily within his ability. That we never got to see Knotts play a tighter, more compressed style of comedy is certainly our loss.

The Old Man has gone to his Major Award

The Old Man: Would you look at that? Would you look at that?!
Mother: What is it?
The Old Man: Why, it's a leg!
Mother: But what is it?
The Old Man: Well, it's... a leg! You know, like a statue!
Mother: Statue?
The Old Man: Yeah, a statue!
Ralphie: Yeah, a statue...
Mother: Ralphie!
Narrator: My mother was trying to insinuate herself between us and the statue.
The Old Man: Holy smokes! Do you know what this is? This is... a lamp!
Narrator: It was indeed a lamp.
The Old Man: Isn't that great? What a great lamp!
Mother: I don't know...
Narrator: The Old Man's eyes boggled... overcome by art.
Mr. Parker: Oh wow! It's... it's... it's indescribably beautiful! It reminds me of the Fourth of July!

Darren McGavin, I drink to your leg.

Superb

Richard Bright died last weekend after being hit by a Manhattan bus. You didn't want to get into a fishing boat with Richard Bright.

Bright played Michael Corleone's most trusted enforcer, Al Neri — the only family henchman to survive all three Godfather movies. In The Godfather, Neri kills the family's greatest enemy, Barzini, during the climactic baptism-bloodbath, and ascends to the Corleone inner circle when Michael becomes the new Godfather. (He's the one who shuts the door on Kay in that movie's great final shot.)

In The Godfather Part II, after the attempt on his life, Michael lists Neri as one of the men he suspects might be the traitor in the family. When he discovers that it's actually his brother Fredo who has betrayed him, Michael ominously tells Neri, “I don't want anything to happen to him while my mother is alive.” At their mother's funeral, as Michael embraces the weeping Fredo, he and Neri exchange a dark and meaningful look — only they know what now must happen. Neri somberly lowers his head in silent acceptance of this sinister duty.

Soon after, Fredo and Neri go fishing in a small boat on Lake Tahoe, and while Fredo is reciting his Hail Marys, Neri shoots Michael's older brother in the back of the head. On shore, at the sound of the shot echoing across the water, Michael now lowers his head in acceptance, and his fall past redemption is final. To the very end, all but Neri (Tom Hagen included) are shielded from the dark truth of Fredo's demise.

Bright also had a memorable (and completely different) role in another of my favorite films, Beautiful Girls. He plays Tim Hutton's sad, lonely father, who can't stop repeating “That was really superb, Tracy” when Annabeth Gish prepares what is probably his first home-cooked meal since the death of his wife. Bright has maybe six or seven lines total in that movie, yet he creates a character so pathetic that our hearts break even as we laugh at him.

Richard Bright was able to pull off roles like this — emotional weight with very few lines — because he had cold eyes and blank features. With an unflinching, unaffected stare, he could communicate a grave, dangerous resolve, or a dead, tired emptiness. You could look deep into his features and get nothing back. He often played menacing or slimy characters, but he was at his best when we played the Empty Man. That's how he'll be remembered — as the elephant in the room at Mama Corleone's funeral, and the sad man who kept muttering “superb.”

Back to your regularly scheduled pogrom

Dammit. All my favorite characters are being killed off, and I'm starting to develop attachment issues. And I wholly blame HBO for starting this bloody massacre of the likable.

[Obligatory warning: abandon here all ye who dodge spoilers.]

It started last year with Deadwood. The damned sanfan-sissko-cogsockers behind Deadwood, the best (non-island) show on television, had to go and kill William. I don't think I've actually liked a TV kid since, well, Wednesday Addams. But William was bright, clever, brave, and he brought out the best in Bullock. I guess those are precisely the reasons why he had to be trampled into the muck. (They also found it necessary to knock off Wolcott, who was far from likable, but still a great character.)

At about the same time, Six Feet Under had to initiate the show's finale by killing off Nate — and then everyone else. Then Rome got into the act. Now yes, obviously I did see this guy's demise coming, but still, he was by far the best character on the show.

Not to be outdone by HBO, this year the networks pulled their blades and starting lopping heads. Smallville, as previously lamented, knocked off Jonathan last month. And two weeks later, Battlestar Galactica put a bullet in Billy. Note that these are two shows where every main character has been “killed” at least once. Now suddenly, death is permanent? Irreversible? Couldn't we irreversibly kill Lionel instead?

The last straw: Over the weekend we finally saw Serenity — a great movie based on a really great show, except that those @$$#Ø£ε$ went and killed Wash! Just like that! Thunk... Wash is dead!

Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's like Josey Wales said: “That’s just how it is. When I get to likin’ someone, they ain’t around very long.” If that's the case, Eko, Chloe, Kaylee, and Sol had better watch their backs.

Geeking Spring

I love graphs. (I am a nerd.) I love Spring. (I am a romantic nerd.) Nerds and Spring go together. (The root of the Latin word for Spring is Vern.)

What happens when bright sunlight pours into a nerd’s office after months of darkness and rain? Well let me tell you. Said nerd Googles the yearly sunrise/sunset info for his city, drops the data into Excel, et voila:

(Stay with me. Please stay.)

The yellow area represents daylight spread across a calendar year (January on the left, December on the right — that ridge that “jumps up” in the middle is the joyous miracle of Daylight Savings Time). The time of day runs up the Y-axis, midnight to midnight. So pretty.

For context, those green horizontal lines slice out a typical work day, the lower one being the time I get up, and the upper one the time I get home. Thus, the bright yellow sections below and above those green lines represent the times of year when I wake up and come home in daylight.

(Still here? Bless you.)

Payoff: That red vertical line approximates where we are right now — and every day, that line nudges a little to the right, ever closer to the big bulge of summer. See how close we are? So close.

And, ahem, “according to my calculations” (Werner! My lab coat and clipboard! Schnell! Schnell!), we will cross those green lines into the bright-yellow zone in…

beep boop beep boo-ching

Fourteen days. Hallelujah.

Disclaimer: Rain and clouds are not represented. To account for those, print graph and randomly splotch yellow area with gray, viscous material.

Confection and absolution

It's 10 AM, and I'm sitting at my desk chomping on the chocolates my wife sent with me. I'm supposed to be sharing these with coworkers — and maybe I will... eventually... if they're nice — but damn.

Maus, who has Wonka blood, has been on a chocolatiering tear for the last year and a half, and the yield has been prodigious, bordering on surreal. She forklifts in crated slabs of chocolate (which she breaks up with a chisel and sledgehammer), and cranks out perfect little confections by the gross. And then she lovingly paints them, one by one.

Right now I'm working on a large glob of gooey caramel-chocolate truffle the size of a ping-pong ball, sprinkled in sea salt. Jeet Sweesus! I'm trying to lay off the golden, glittering coffee-Sambuca ones, at least until this afternoon, as the morning's double-shot is already coursing through my veins, and with all the added sugar, I'm only a nudge away from overturning my desk in violent, barbaric glee as it is.

This is my life. And, as is my Valentine's Day custom, tonight I shall “repay” this amazing woman by cooking a meal so ridiculously beyond my capacity that it's quite likely I will blow up the house, and all the chocolate therein. Which, if nothing else, will be a good show for the neighbors.

Blam

Remember all the “conflict of interest” hoopla a few years ago over Dick Cheney going duck hunting with Justice Scalia? Boy, talk about missing the mark!

Let's get those two back together. Bigger guns, extra shells, and LOTS of beer! Weapons free, gentlemen — fire at will.

Yeehaw.

This is movie I want

(Sorry, that's an obscure title reference: See Rock Hudson in Winchester 73.)

Are you listening, Hollywood? I'm making a hesitation pitch here:

We need a movie about the Pittsburgh Crawfords in the early 1930s — Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Judy Johnson, Oscar Charleston, Rev Cannady, Willie Gisentaner, the whole lot.

Naturally, as with any historical examination of the Negro Leagues, the temptation will be to tackle head-on the terrible injustice of baseball's color line, the racism these men had to endure, the loss to baseball fans everywhere — and rightly so (how can it be that America learned to split the atom two years before it learned to accept a black ballplayer?). Still, what this movie needs to do is focus primarily on the way these men played baseball, the way they reinvented and re-energized the game.

Baseball fans can read no end of material about Satchel Paige's crazy windups and fireball delivery, or Josh Gibson's thundering power, or Cool Papa Bell's blinding speed, but I want to see it. I want to the see the game played as they played it, beginning to end and top to bottom — with all the heckling and clowning and showboating. I want to see their life on the road as they barnstorm the country.

The inherent injustice behind the Negro Leagues will hang over the story and permeate every frame of the film without any heavy-handed soul searching — so leave it alone and let the story tell itself. Concentrate on the men, the game, and the era (please don't sermonize or eulogize), and you'll get a stronger and more moving story.

And give us detail: Cast someone who can meticulously replicate Paige's contortions on the mound. Get Buck O'Neil to help work out the scripting of the team's antics on and off the field. Focus on the team's colorful numbers-running owner and promoter, Gus Greenlee, and all the after-hours hijinks at Greenlee's Crawford Grill (where Bojangles Robinson performed). For a sense of historical perspective, get Morgan Freeman to do voice-over narration as a 103-year-old Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe.

And end the movie with a very, very young Jackie Robinson coming on the scene in Kansas City in 1944 — a full decade after Paige, Gibson, and Bell played on the greatest team in Negro League history. These men set the table for Robinson — they're the ones who truly broke the color line. But, as Branch Rickey rightly understood, baseball needed a rookie to actually cross the color line. It wasn't fair, but it was somewhat biblical (see Moses, River Jordan, crossing of).

(And yes, I have seen The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings — a fine fictionalized account of the era. Let's do even better this time, huh?)

How does next summer sound for release date? I'll be waiting.

Thanks, Hollywood. I talk a lot of shit, but you know I love you.

James Lileks: Meh.

I read this guy every day, because he's a great writer and a brilliant humorist. This, after all, is the man who put together perhaps the best two-word combo in the history of literature: shaved horta. He's the mind behind the Institute of Official Cheer — which of its own weight is enough to justify and redeem the internet, pornworms and spamups be damned.

But there's someting in his writing that makes my temples ache (I'm not talking about his politics, though see below for more on that) — something I couldn't quite articulate until I thought of this snippet of dialogue from Woody Allen's wonderful Manhattan, in which Isaac (Allen) is appalled by Yale and Mary's (Michael Murphy and Diane Keaton) smug intellectual dismissal of many of his heroes:

Yale: I think Lewitt's overrated. In fact, I think he may be a candidate for the Academy. Mary and I have invented the Academy of the Overrated, for such notables as Gustav Mahler...
Mary: And Isak Dinesen, and Carl Jung...
Yale: Scott Fitzgerald...
Mary: Lenny Bruce. Can't forget Lenny Bruce, now, can we? How about Norman Mailer? And Walt Whitman?
Isaac: I think that those people are all terrific, every one that you mentioned.
Yale: Who was that guy you had? You had a great one last week...
Mary: No, I didn't have it — it was yours. It was Heinrich Böll, wasn't it?
Isaac: Overrated?
Yale: Oh, God. Oh, we wouldn't want to leave out old Heinrich...
Isaac: What about Mozart? I mean, you guys don't want to leave out Mozart, I mean, while you're trashing people...
Mary: Ah, well, how about Vincent van Goch?
Isaac: Van Goch? She said van Goch? Van Goch...
Mary: Or Ingmar Bergman?
Isaac: Bergman? Bergman is the only genius in cinema today, I think.
Yale: He's a big Bergman fan.
Mary: God, you're so the opposite, I mean you write that absolutely fabulous television show, it's really, really funny, and his view is so Scandinavian. It's bleak. My God, I mean, all that Kirkegaard, right? Real adolescent, you know, fashionable pessimism. I mean, the silence, God's silence? OK, OK, OK, I mean, I loved it when I was at Radcliffe, but I mean, all right, you outgrow it, you absolutely outgrow it.
Isaac: Get her away from me. I don't think I can take much more.

That's what reading James Lileks is often like. His stuff is filled with casual, apathetic dismissal of, well, just about everything I ever liked or admired. He's basically built a name for himself by pissing on other people's work. (He's certainly not the first, but it's a game that should be reserved for hacks, not humorists.)

Naturally, I don't feel too bad for the many writers, designers, and cooks who ended up on the pointy end of books like Interior Desecrations and The Gallery of Regrettable Food (one of Maus's favorites). They surely had it coming, and one hopes any survivors among them appreciate the joke — especially as an alternative to falling off the horizon into the abyss of obscurity.

But outside of Lileks's playful skewering of the truly awful, there is also a detached, almost mean dismissiveness of many truly wonderful things — a quality usually found among teenagers and smug intellectuals, though he be neither. It's something of a conundrum, since his writing also makes it obvious that the man is full of love and passion, and he immerses himself in much of the popular culture for which he shows such disdain.

Among those to be found in Lileks's personal Academy of the Overrated: Bob Dylan, Bing Crosby, Hunter Thompson, John Lennon, Alfred Hitchcock, Katharine Hepburn, Orson Welles, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Garry Trudeau, Garrison Keillor, Kurt Vonnegut, Kim Novak, Sesame Street, Superman, Battlestar Galactica, all blues singers, and, but of course, Woody Allen.

(That's a mere half-hour's Googling. Lord knows what other sacred cows have fallen victim to his withering “meh” of dismissal — or worse, his disdainful Perry stare: Gregory Peck? Mark Twain? Babe Ruth? Shakespeare? Mozart? Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream?!)

Ouch. Maybe I'm not in on the joke, but if I were sealed in a bunker with only the above to occupy my time, I'd consider myself very nicely set. I think that those things are all terrific, every one...

Not that he isn't entitled to his opinion like the rest of us (just ask his wife), but I'm immediately suspicious of anyone who goes out of his way make sure we all know that he thinks The Beatles are overrated. The Beatles. That's a too-cool-for-you slam dunk. The poor man can't even reflect on how much he loves his dog without working in a dig at people who believe that dogs love them back...

The great irony is how often he lovingly delights in his daughter's joyful exuberance, and laments the coming day when it will wilt under the detached coolness of her teen years, when everything will suck. Well, if she takes after her father, he'd better dig in for a long, rough ride.

My point? Why should I care? Because, like I said, the man is brilliant. And it kills me to see this kind of talent wasted on curmudgeonism. MAKE WITH THE JOY. Take a little unabashed, unapologetic delight in the world! Exempli gratia...

Which brings me, unnecessarily but as promised, to Mr. Lileks's unpleasant, snide, and practically incomprehensible political rants, which always strike me as wildly out of character for anyone of intelligence and wit, regardless of their leanings. His favorite gag is to paint himself and his conservative chums as reasonable, thoughtful, balanced fellows of jocular good humor, and liberals as hysterical, shrill, unhinged idiots. He thinks he stands steadfastly in the center, yet his back is permanently turned towards anyone on his left.

A typical example: While one demonstrator's anti-Bush sign forever taints the honor of the liberal, anti-war crowd in Lileks's mind (“I will recall that sign when I hear their names,” he says), he considers it really poor sport for these same people to take conservatives to task for the rantings of Pat Robertson — or Ann Coulter. For a guy this sharp, whose talents I so admire, to be so superficial and disingenuous... is painful. Disheartening.

And for a smart guy who sees nothing but mediocrity everywhere he turns to somehow see George W. Bush as a great man, a noble leader, The Man For The Job? Well, there's only one reasonable response to that:

The crankables

Thanks to the iPod-compatible stereo we recently had installed in our car, commuting has suddenly become a personal learning experience. Left on shuffle with 5,000+ songs at its disposal, the iPod has been treating me to a kind of ongoing Rorschach/free-associative/reflex-response test.

The question: Which songs cause one (me) to reflexively crank the volume to window-rattling levels? A few controls to observe:
1) I must be alone in the car, as the presence of a wife in the car (usually) activates the self-policing subroutine.
2) The volume-cranking reflex must be instinctive, immediate, involuntary.
3) The volume spike must be considerable — I do not generally drive with the music turned way up, so the cranking response must fall well outside the norm to qualify.

The results are interesting — no direct correlation between the crank-response and my conscious affinity for a specific song is apparent. Only a handful of these songs would actually make my "Top 100" list, and a number of them betray an apparent and unfortunate Pavlovian conditioning to 80s rock. Nevertheless, personal dignity must be set aside if science is to be served.

Should you pass me on the road and see my head bobbing convulsively, and hear the steady whumm-whumm-whumm of rattling speakers, it's a fair bet that the iPod has served up one of the following selections:

1. Wild Thing - X
2. (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction - Rolling Stones
3. Wreck of the Old '97 - Johnny Cash
4. Danger Zone - Kenny Loggins
5. Wild Flower - The Cult
6. Jump Around - House Of Pain
7. Yin and Yang and the Flower Pot Man - Love and Rockets
8. White Wedding - Billy Idol
9. Goin' Out West - Tom Waits
10. Cocaine Blues - Johnny Cash
11. Panama - Van Halen
12. One Week - Barenaked Ladies
13. Been Caught Stealing - Jane's Addiction
14. What a Day That Was - Talking Heads
15. Blaze of Glory - Bon Jovi
16. Save Me - Remy Zero
17. Blood on the Coal - The Folksmen
18. Wild Wild Life - Talking Heads
19. Punk Rock Girl - Dead Milkmen
20. Jumpin' Jack Flash - Rolling Stones
21. Man in the Box - Alice in Chains
22. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald - Gordon Lightfoot
23. Sharp Dressed Man - ZZ Top
24. Suicide Blonde - INXS
25. Lust For Life - Iggy Pop
26. Surfin' Bird - The Trashmen
27. Smoke on the Water - Deep Purple
28. A Girl Like You - The Smithereens
29. Sweet Young Thing - The Monkees
30. Up on Cripple Creek - The Band

Play ball!

Hey, how about that? In one fell swoop — that is, one eventful weekend, Winter moved out. And after 8 straight weeks of soggy misery, good fœcking riddance.

And what a (cue Mr. Ed/Big Bopper voice) cra-a-a-a-a-a-a-zy finale. Acutally, I'm not sure if Saturday's dramatic pummelstorm was Winter executing a scorched-earth retreat, or if that was Spring kicking down the door and knocking Winter's ass to the curb. Either way, all I know is: clouds gone, rain gone, sunshine back, Matt happy.

When I was in the yard yesterday cleaning up the arboreal carnage, I noted with delight that (cue James Brown voice) heeeeeeyyyy! — the grass needs to be mowed!

It would seem Mr. Groundhog was wrong — or maybe what he really saw was the shadow of the Steelers mascot.

Hats off to the Seahawks, by the way, and condolences to all the die-hard fans who must have spent last night dreaming of football officials being hanged by their penalty flags. Take the day off, go stand out in that mysterious healing sunshine — you've earned it.

At the risk of treading heavily on the angst of wounded neighbors, let me now issue a reverent-but-earnest hurrah for the end of football! Pitchers and catchers report to camp in 9 days! 9 days! Damn I love February!

I fully realize that it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better — every year, without fail, we get a week or two of bright blues and greens in February, always followed by a nasty, cold, ugly March. Some among us (come on, Brooke, give us a smile!) consider this a mean-spirited tease, a false hope, a mere mirage to be dismissed...

Oh, no. No indeed.

February's annual week of sunshine is a faithful promise, a sneak preview, a flirtatious wink — it's February's way of saying I am NOT January. Don't hate me just because I live next door to that creep. February lets us know that we're going to make it. She gives us a playful nudge, and before we know it, she's gone — and we're staring Spring right in the face.

So don't be fooled when the weather turns foul again in a couple days — that's just Winter coming back to pick up his CDs and shampoo. He'll be in an ugly mood and he'll say some nasty things to make us feel as bad as possible, but then he's out of here.

And let me just reiterate: Pitchers and catchers report in 8 days, 22 hours, and 1 minute.

Can I get an Amen?

Why I love Ebert

Last night I watched Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, a beautiful and simple and rare film that says almost nothing, yet speaks volumes about both human nature and what it means to just be. This film has been on my “to-see” list for about two years, and I'm glad I finally got around to it, because it will stick with me.

I came to this movie by way of Roger Ebert's Great Movies series, which he started five or six years ago, and which I make a point of following closely — any time he highlights a film I haven't seen, I add it to my list. I'm consistently a half-dozen or so films behind, which leaves me with a nice reserve should I ever feel like bingeing on a batch of really good (and to me, new) movies.

I point people to Ebert's list whenever they ask me if there's a “canon” of great movies they should see. His catalog is subjective and incomplete, of course (two of my all-time top five, Rio Bravo and The Philadelphia Story, are missing), but it's a well-balanced, thoughtful, and inventive syllabus, with (pardon the phrase) something for everyone, and it's always growing.

Ebert the writer is nothing like the “thumbs up/thumbs down” critic he plays on TV; he's a scholar and an essayist with a genuine passion for movies. He's more game, optimistic, and forgiving than many of his crankier intellectual collegaues (Kael, Sarris, Thomson) — he employs neither sledgehammer nor scalpel in his criticism. He clearly loves movies, and doesn't hesitate to lavish praise on a stupid movie that delighted him. It's obvious that he also loves to write, and he's very skilled when it comes to conveying how a movie feels, what it accomplishes, and how it fits into the universe of film.

For instance, take these excerpts from his review of Au Hasard Balthazar — a film which follows the lives of a handful of people, as observed by a passive (and “saintly”) donkey:

“What we see through Balthazar's eyes is a village filled with small, flawed, weak people, in a world where sweetness is uncommon and cruelty comes easily.”

“The genius of Bresson's approach is that he never gives us a single moment that could be described as one of Balthazar's ‘reaction shots’ ... Balthazar simply walks or waits, regarding everything with the clarity of a donkey who knows it is a beast of burden, and that its life consists of either bearing or not bearing, of feeling pain or not feeling pain, or even feeling pleasure. All of these things are equally beyond its control.”

“Although the donkey has no way of revealing its thoughts, that doesn't prevent us from supplying them — quite the contrary; we regard that white-spotted furry face and those big eyes, and we feel sympathy with every experience the donkey undergoes. That is Bresson's civilizing and even spiritual purpose in most of his films; we must go to the characters, instead of passively letting them come to us. In the vast majority of movies, everything is done for the audience. We are cued to laugh or cry, be frightened or relieved; Hitchcock called the movies a machine for causing emotions in the audience.”

“Bresson (and Ozu) take a different approach. They regard, and ask us to regard along with them, and to arrive at conclusions about their characters that are our own. This is the cinema of empathy.”

“[Bresson] was known to shoot the same shot 10, 20, even 50 times, until all ‘acting’ was drained from it, and the actors were simply performing the physical actions and speaking the words. There was no room in his cinema for De Niro or Penn. It might seem that the result would be a movie filled with zombies, but quite the contrary: By simplifying performance to the action and the word without permitting inflection or style, Bresson achieves a kind of purity that makes his movies remarkably emotional. The actors portray lives without informing us how to feel about them; forced to decide for ourselves how to feel, forced to empathize, we often have stronger feelings than if the actors were feeling them for us.”

Note the emotional, historical, and technical perspective Eberts puts on this film — reading the above, you already understand quite a lot about the movie, and you've also gained some insight on Bresson, Ozu, and Hitchcock (all of whom have multiple entries on the Great Movies roster). If you watched Au Hasard Balthazar and found it moving, you might very well want to see Ozu's Tokyo Story next.

Ebert's series has led me to many films that I now consider all-time favorites: Laura, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Out of the Past, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Thin Man, and the films of Jacques Tati. Then there are all the amazing and bizarre movies I never even knew existed until Ebert pointed them out, like Herzog's Stroszek, Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes, Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre, Ray's The Music Room, Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel, Powell's Peeping Tom, and Cocteau's stunning Beauty and the Beast.

Just listing those films, I'm reminded of this passage from Ebert's introduction to his Great Movies series, which (once again) hits the nail right on the head:

“One of the gifts one movie lover can give another is the title of a wonderful film they have not yet discovered. In university, I had a Shakespeare professor who was the world's leading expert in Romeo and Juliet, and who used to say he would give anything for the ability to read the play again for the first time. When I meet someone who has never seen The Third Man or Singin' in the Rain, I envy them the experience they are about to have.”

“Fool hew-mans! There is no escape!”

State of the Union: Didn't watch it.

Justice Alito: Never heard of him.

Hamas: Not a fan.

Robot Monster: Now you're talking! What a movie! How did I go 34 years without ever setting aside the modest 60 minutes it takes to absorb this masterpiece of cinema? Well, I'm pleased to announce that this oversight has been rectified. That, people, was an hour well spent.

What's Robot Monster? Trust me, you know it. Pehaps not by name, but I'm sure there isn't a man, woman, or child who doesn't instantly recognize the monstrosity that is Ro-Man.

That's right — it's the infamous and endlessly lampooned man-in-gorilla-suit-and-diving-helmet. He has come to destroy all remaining life on Earth (all but eight “hew-mans” have fallen to Ro-Man's Calcinator Death Ray, which manifests itself either literally or symbolically as wrestling dinosaurs). All Ro-Man needs to complete his mission is a cave where he can set up his vanity-mirror communication panel and his trusty Billion Bubble Machine!

“There is no escape from me! Very well, I will recalculate. Your death will be indescribable. Fool hew-mans, there is no escape!”

There's a great write-up of the film on Cool Cinema Trash — pretty much everything that can be said about Robot Monster is there.

Plan 9 From Outer Space and Manos: The Hands Of Fate are Robot Monster's only credible competition for the title of Worst Movie Ever. Of the three, Robot is the only one that is laugh-out-loud bad (Plan 9 and Manos are more painful than entertaining). It's also the only one that feels like it's really trying, desperately trying to pull itself together. And it's certainly the only one that I actually enjoyed watching, and intend to watch again.

Do the right thing. Take an hour that would otherwise go to mediocre television, and donate it instead to the poetic, immortal awfulness of Robot Monster. Trust me, you will recalculate.