Offbeat & Very Casual:
Beating Off with Offbeat Boox & Comix!
Enough with the long Myrant flashbacks: time for the here-and-now, to share some of what I’ve been reading of late. Spring is here, the Center for Cartoon Studies Class ...
Offbeat & Very Casual:
Beating Off with Offbeat Boox & Comix!
Enough with the long Myrant flashbacks: time for the here-and-now, to share some of what I’ve been reading of late. Spring is here, the Center for Cartoon Studies Class of 2013 graduation was this past Saturday (congratulations, grads, you made it! Now, get to work!), and I’m in overdrive at the drawing board, the keyboard, while glutting out on reading and writing and no ‘rithmatic, save what I have to tackle for taxes, insurance, and planning retirement.
Recommended Reading: Books
* My favorite new book to drift into my massive mitts came sailing in from the good folks at Headpress, tapping a vein of lifetime viewing pleasure and research obsessions I share with its authors and editor of note. Judging film books by the “buy now/to find” lists they generate for me, the brand-spankin’-new Julian Upton (editor, co-author) book OFFBEAT: BRITISH CINEMA’S CURIOSITIES, OBSCURITIES AND FORGOTTEN GEMS (Headpress, 2013) is the best of its breed since Jonathan Rigby‘s STUDIES IN TERROR: LANDMARKS OF HORROR CINEMA from last year. That’s a recommendation from me, folks, and I gleefully devoured this book (amid a very busy week) in short order—then blew money I didn’t really have to spend on some of the movies Julian and his cronies whet my appetite for.
With the clearly stated intent of illuminating British gems, sleepers, and curios circa 1955-1985 other studies have ignored or overlooked, Upton (who crafted Fallen Stars for Headpress some nine years ago) and his fellow contributors (including Darrell Buxton, Sam Dunn, Mark Goodall, Graeme Hobbs, David Hyman, Martin Jones, Sarah Morgan, James Oliver, Gary Ramsay, David Sutton, Andrew Syers, Phil Tonge, Jennifer Wallis, the great Kim Newman and Headpress co-founders David Kerekes and David Slater) fill the bill nicely. Per usual, the book design is attractive and alluring stem to stern, and my only real complaint is: more, I want more!
I was delighted to find I’d in fact seen many of the titles covered herein as I was growing up. Surprising, really, given the paucity of access to movies growing up in Vermont, but late-night TV and local theaters and drive-ins really did play a lot of these gems over the years. Thankfully, many are in my vhs/DVD library, but for every one I’d seen or could so easily revisit there was another I’d missed or never had the opportunity to see (and that aren’t available in any format anywhere in the world).
For every title I thought “really?,” there were two or three I agreed fit the bill perfectly: The Mark, Yellow Teddy Bears, The Unearthly Stranger, The Strange Affair, Emmanuelle in Soho, The Squeeze, Sitting Target, Quest for Love, The Black Panther (a particularly blunt slice of true-life crime, served cold, and just resurrected on DVD by the British Film Institute Flipside label) and the like demonstrate a pretty wide net being cast and a healthy catch, with a preference for the odd crime, sordid insavory & saucy curios, baseline rock, and borderline horror fare.
Thankfully, a few that were impossible to see as Upton & company scribed and compiled this book are now in reach (i.e., the Warner Archives release of The Squeeze and Sitting Target, Sony/Columbia releasing The Reckoning on DVD-R, etc.), but there’s much here one can only hope BFI Flipside or some other label resurrects once OFFBEAT makes the rounds.
For instance: alas, Roy Ward Baker‘s bizarre British proto-spaghetti western The Singer Not the Song isn’t available in its proper widescreen format anywhere I’ve ever found, though at least the complete running time makes the UK release on DVD the one to get just now
(here ya go, and you’re welcome).
I particularly savored the interstitial overviews of genres and subgenres, including a tantalizing overview of the Children’s Film Foundation and the two chapt