Dan Haggerty, RIP

I was into martial arts movies back then. I snapped out of it one night. I had watched some kung fu movie, it ended, then watched the last few minutes of The Capture of Grizzly Adams. And I realized that Dan Haggerty's climactic knife fight on a rope bridge was much better done.

"What is this film called Love", Mark Cousins, 2012

Filmed on a Flip video camera.

Mark Cousins, the Irish guy who made the series The Story of Film, wanders around Mexico City talking to a photo of Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein was there long ago when he made Que Viva Mexico.

Cousins keeps patronizing Eisenstein. He tells Eisenstein what a cell phone is. Like Eisenstein wouldn't know. If he can hear Cousins and watch his rather obscure movie, he must have some idea what's happening in the world of the living. Cousins says he wants to play something by Elvis Presley for Eisenstein but can't because of copyright. He briefly explains copyright to Eisenstein. Which might be reasonable since the USSR wasn't part of the international copyright convention.

Cousins thinks Eisenstein was secretly anti-Communist. Don't know why he didn't stay in Hollywood if that was the case. I suppose that if Eisenstein died and found himself in Heaven, he would HAVE to re-think some aspects of Dialectical Materialism, but I can't imagine it would make him pro-capitalist.

One gross thing about Cousins is that he runs around naked out in the desert at one point. He's all white and pasty.

Available on Fandor. 80 minutes.

I know this isn't much of a review.

It might make an interesting double feature with George Kuchar's "The Mongreloid" which consists in part of George talking to his dog, Bocko. 

The photo Cousins was talking to.

And Cousins himself.

Vilmos Zsigmond, RIP

Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond has died at age 85. He won an Oscar for Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

He came to the U.S. from Hungary in '56 and worked on low budget movies until he began working with Robert Altman.

One low budget film he made was Wild Guitar, directed by the late Ray Dennis Steckler, starring Arch Hall, Jr. It had a romantic scene in an ice rink you can see here. Zsigmond didn't want to do it, but Steckler had him light the scene with a single spotlight resulting in the lens flares you see in the final shot of the kids kissing. Steckler joked that he set Zsigmond on course for the Oscar with the lens flares in Close Encounters.

They actually add lens flares digitally now.