Randy Ray

The great photographer sat curled on the Hampton, Virginia stage like an invisible snake holding a widescreen camera. Indeed, the renowned lensman, Danny Clinch appeared more like a Pirate King on the prowl for his next big scenic adventure—dark hair slicked back, black boots rooted to no one spot for too long, and a sharp arch in his eyebrows.

Watching him shoot Phish’s return to the stage on March 6, 2009, brought to mind Clinch’s collaboration with the Vermont band in 2004 as they neared what appeared to be a conclusion before what became a very long, frustrating, and confusing second hiatus for the Best Live Band in America. Indeed, two entities edging towards The End with links to two legendary bands are the subject of another double feature edition of Hidden Flick.

Timothy Leary’s Last Trip was co-created by A.J. Cataline, David Herman, and O.B. Babbs, the son of original Merry Prankster Ken Babbs, who also hosts the documentary. The film is weird, far from perfect, amateur hour, and somewhat ridiculous at times. However, it is also a fascinating 56-minute study of Leary at the end of his life. Last Trip isn’t exactly a final acid adventure captured on celluloid, so let’s dispel that notion. Instead, the documentary features the ex-Harvard professor and lifelong psychedelic pioneer, and his relationship with LSD, the countercultural movement, drug prosecution laws, Hog Farm leader Wavy Gravy, and, of course, the noted writer, co-partner in acid, and famed rabble-rouser, Ken Kesey, as he accompanies Leary on a few road trips—the Pranksters clean up the ancient Furthur bus, and take it on a trip with some of the original MP crew, offspring, and Leary and Kesey in tow—and a cyberspace journey—a final call from Kesey to Leary which ran on the net, and was alleged to feature a Leary suicide, but that turned into a mythic charade—before his demise of prostate cancer on May 31, 1996.

READ ON for more on this week’s double feature…

Willfully walking into a wild and wacky situation is one thing. To do so in the pursuit of some sort of lofty man-made goal, and hope to pull through with all of one’s senses intact is quite another thing entirely. What is it one is really looking for? How to get it done? Does it really matter in the end? When has one truly gone over the edge? A case by case basis, to be sure, and The Edge, as Hunter S. Thompson would have said, is in the mind of the beholder as we commence on our little journey down the rabbit hole of madness.

A murder has been committed, and there are three witnesses. Unfortunately, the crime occurred in an insane asylum, and the witnesses aren’t speaking, so the main character, a journalist in a gravely misguided pursuit of a Pulitzer Prize for solving the mystery, decides to have himself committed into the institution in this week’s Hidden Flick, a sharp, haunting, and sometimes completely bonkers film, Samuel Fuller’s 1963 cautionary tale of moral destiny and mental destitution, Shock Corridor.

Peter Breck plays Johnny Barrett, the ambitious scribe, who is so confident in his own intellect and talent that he concocts a weird back-story to get himself inside the mental hospital as a patient with a lecherous edge. His girlfriend, Cathy, a stripper with the proverbial heart of gold, played by Constance Towers, would pretend to be his sister, and complain to the authorities that her brother was molesting her, and should be committed because of his pending mental breakdown and dangerous threat to society. Barrett would simply pose as a patient, investigate the other patients and guards, eventually interview the three witnesses to the murder, solve the case, identify the murderer, write his glorious story, and win the Pulitzer Prize. Such a brilliant and easy enough idea, right?

READ ON for more on this week’s Hidden Flick – Shock Corridor…

Mickey Rourke’s return to film glory in the title role of the The Wrestler comes at the same time as Laurence Fishburne’s new role on CSI, the long-running television hit. Both actors appeared under the tutelage of Francis Ford Coppola during a time in the early 1980s when the director was attempting to reinvigorate his mojo by filming S.E. Hinton’s teenaged rebel with a purpose novels. And Coppola was true to his cause as he experimented with style and tone poetry at a time when those virtues were being smothered by slasher flick and Reagan-era teen angst motifs.

“Loyalty is his only vice,” is one of my favorite film lines and it crops up about midway through this week’s Hidden Flick as we head into the second season of films that are off the beaten cinematic path with a look at the minor gem, Rumble Fish.

Filmed in black & white, Rumble Fish also stars Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Diana Scarwid and Nicolas Cage, Coppola’s nephew in one of his earliest roles. However, it is the weird and twisted appearances of Rourke, Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, and Tom Waits that add nuance and texture to what could have been a forgettable cheesy endeavor. Hopper is the alcoholic father who spouts historical references and odd sound bites to his beleaguered son, played by Dillon, and Fishburne, is sort of a guardian angel to the hapless lad, as well. Waits sinks his teeth into his role as an eccentric billiards hall owner, foreshadowing his 1992 bent romp as Renfield in Coppola’s Dracula.

READ ON for more on this week’s Hidden Flick – Rumble Fish…

[Originally Published: March 26, 2008]

What do Jerry Garcia, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Luis Bunuel and Neil Gaiman have in common? Well, they all in some way are connected with a film made by a Polish director set in the Spanish Inquisition about the surreal adventures of a soldier who has found an ancient manuscript during the Napoleonic Wars. Oh, and the film was based upon a novel written in Spanish by a legendary Polish writer and adventurer, Count Jan Potocki at the turn of the 19th century—crazed mystics help to narrate the sweet wreckage drenched in ghost stories, bent royalty, and seductively demonic women.

The film by Wojciech Has is The Saragossa Manuscript and it is a wild jaunt through incredible scenes of such mind-blowing cleverness that one is drawn deeper down the rabbit hole into a rich maze of tales within a tale within an overall twisted myth. At certain points, narration shifts between characters, settings of time and space (a familiar Hidden Flick theme) leap back and forth, exotic eccentric ‘story-guides’ fade in and out of the mix and all of the adventures are accompanied by a truly spacey soundtrack by Krzysztof Penderecki, who would go on to add music to The Exorcist and The Shining.

And what the heck does that odd cavalcade of artists that began this piece have to do with this rich, ancient celluloid artifact? In the 1990s, Jerry Garcia along with Scorsese and Coppola helped fund a restoration of the film for modern audiences. Sadly, the film was to undergo its final inspection the day after the Grateful Dead leader’s passing in August 1995 and he never saw the print in its full restored 182-minute glory. Read on for more about Jerry Garcia’s favorite movie…

• The Saragossa Manuscript: Netflix / Amazon

[Originally Published 07/01/2008]

We enter an intermission in our bi-weekly search for the ever elusive Hidden Flick, and look at films that were once praised but have since been somewhat forgotten. As we walk up to the ethereal snack bar and pile up on the keg-sized Popcorn, boxes of Raisinettes, Red Vines, SnoCaps, Peanut M&M’s (Jesus, take it easy, fatso), Goobers, and 99-ounce Diet Cokes (trying to cut back a little?), we ponder yesteryear’s sublime cinematic pearl.

This installment of our Intermission column—appearing every ten issues if one is either an accountant, an obsessive fan, or prone to keep track of these mathematical things—will focus on the 1979 coming-of-age film Breaking Away, based in Bloomington, Indiana, and featuring a squadron of snotty college dorks racing each other on steroid-enhanced bikes, while another quartet of less-than-privileged town folks—sons of the almighty “Cutters,” limestone quarry workers in Indiana who helped build the very university in which they occasionally drive by and mock the Richie Riches—ponder their next step as they move away from the warm comfort of high school and look ahead into the abyss that is one’s future when colleges aren’t exactly knocking on your SAT door.

Breaking Away was the little film that could as the 1970s came to a close. The film was a winner before a shot had been printed as it featured an Academy Award-winning script by Steve Tesich, ace casting of future stars-to-be Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern and Dennis Christopher while also amassing a stellar supporting cast of seasoned veterans: Paul Dooley—who played the coolest, most realistic dad in cinematic history—Barbara Barrie, who was humor, warmth and pathos-personified, and Bad News Bears veteran Jackie Earle Haley, the cool kid who was only 3 feet tall in that baseball film (O.K. I exaggerate. He was 2’10”), but hey, he could hit a ball 400 feet, smoke a pack of Marlboros (it WAS the 70s), date that hot chick that had the hair-wings blow-dried just right, ride a killer motorcycle, and score tickets to the Stones show at the heady age of 12.

READ ON for more on this week’s Hidden Flick: Breaking Away…

[Originally Published: 04/28/2008]

Stanley Kubrick knew the secret pearl of storytelling. One doesn’t bring the vague and blurry messages to the audience. A filmmaker, like a musician, painter, poet, and street corner dude on a milk crate, painted silver and doing robotic dance movements, accompanied by a battered boom box, makes the crowd come to their bit of strange art.

No doubt, if ten people were asked to list their five favorite films by the towering American expatriate who lived the bulk of his adult life in England (like another crazed Yank genius, Terry Gilliam), you’d get five completely different lists. And that’s fine. I have my own favorites, but I don’t hold them to my chest like they are minemineMINE.

Hell, if you still don’t get the god-like majesty of 2001: A Space Odyssey or marvel at how well Kubrick fooled the audience in Eyes Wide Shut, because it was, in fact, almost all a dream, and you needed to track the weird, non-linear jumps in the story to notice that the brilliant and underrated Tom Cruise was given the ultimate mind fuck to fuck with his yuppie mind while he watched…well…how to do that fine sexual task properly, then long-ass segues aside, you were missing Kubrick’s point and need to look again.

Secret societies abound, no secret there, and it is no secret that Eyes Wide Shut carried with it a legion of references to Kubrick’s other work and, in fact, the life he led with his wife when they shared a New York apartment before making their permanent home across the pond in the UK. It was his last film and the links with his other cinematic masterpieces span all the way back to this week’s Hidden Flick, The Killing—a 1950s race track heist gone wrong cobbled together by two titans of non-linear storytelling. READ ON for more of this week’s Hidden Flick…

[Originally Published April 18, 2008] The recent release of Shine a Light had all the veteran rock critics throwing roses to the Stones and Scorsese. Others marveled at the Mt. Rushmore crevices on the weathered faces of the Glimmer Twins. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards do, indeed, look about 2,000 light years past “elegantly wasted” at this point—not to mention the miracle man, Charlie Watts, on the kit, Foghorn Leghorn on rhythm guitar, and that cat that AIN’T Bill Wyman still holding the bass notes all down the line.

Actually, the flick is damn good. Martin Scorsese is still a master at rapid pacing, wicked close-ups and quicksilver edit cuts. Marty is also America’s Best Director (to watch if you just scored a huge bag of blow). The Stones are not the Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band in the World—that was more of a sweet bit of chutzpah spoken by a road manager rather than an actual claim. Hell, for a few moments in 1969 when The Who wasn’t touring behind Tommy, Hendrix wasn’t napalming the hippies in upstate New York, Iggy wasn’t stroking blades, Zeppelin was in between tours, groupies, mud sharks, Acapulco gold, Ballantine beer and a heaping pile of coke, that rock crown claim may have been true.

But by the early ’70s, the Stones had begun a love affair with the jet setters, Jann Wenners, Truman (Where’s Waldo?) Capotes and scenemakers on the edge of rock music and, for all intents and purposes, that trip really never changed much. Except, of course, the Twins got older, stopped doing loads of drugs, cut back on inspired songwriting and, in their fifties, started to tour way more often than they ever had in the past. Money, my friends, will get anyone off the velvet couch and onto the sprawling stage amidst 40-year old songs and a frontman who defies time, taste and a treadmill. Read on for more of this week’s Hidden Flick…

Well…time for more popcorn, Red Vines, Raisinettes, and a refill of that 97-ounce soda. We take a break from our regular look at obscure films with another edition of Intermission, which means another look at a cinematic chestnut that may have been lauded or groundbreaking in the past, but has since been forgotten in history’s hourglass.

The art of making films does not always require human characters. We have seen the future, and life forms come in all different shapes, all manners of tricky invention spun and tweaked through months of computer-generated exotica into various tales—action/adventure, science fiction, fantasy, and the deluge of superhero-centric films. This week’s Hidden Flick was the first feature-length animated film, a unique gem of meticulously crafted silhouettes, and we tip our hat to The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

The tale comes from a classic, time-honored source—excerpts from The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou, found within 1001 Arabian Nights, and featured in Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book. Prince Achmed, Aladdin, a flying horse and the Witch of the Fiery Mountain face-off with a formidable foe, an evil African sorcerer, in order to win the heart of Princess Peri Banu who comes from an island filled with magic.

READ ON for more of this week’s Hidden Flick…

Watching President-elect Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Chicago’s Grant Park, I came across a televised image of Spike Lee greeting Reverend Jesse Jackson. I couldn’t help but think that not only was this country headed in a positive direction with the election of the Illinois senator as our next Commander in Chief, but those who had been dejected and doubtful for so long, also had their moment of truth on that historic evening.

Lee has been making films for over twenty years, and when he began his career, he came across as an extremely funny yet talented angry black man. He is still that angry black man with the soul and confidence to back up his tirades against the injustice of history. However, he is also one of America’s best filmmakers, and like all great men of the cinema, Spike Lee has had his fair share of misfires over the years. She’s Gotta Have It, his debut feature-length film, is not one of those, and stands as this week’s Hidden Flick.

The film was made for $175,000 over two weeks in the summer of 1985, and grossed $7,000,000, which is a major feat in any other era. However, as time has marched onwards into the 21st Century, Lee’s debut celluloid statement seemed to get lost under the wheels of history as Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, and Malcolm X were heralded as his triumphs while some of his other cinematic treasure appeared forgotten.

READ ON for more on this week’s Hidden Flick – She’s Gotta Have It…