October 29, 2004
I went to an outdoor screening of Herk Harvey's Carnival Of Souls at the DMA last night. It was one of those movies I'd been familiar with since childhood through Roger Ebert's review (reading his reviews of horror films was a frequent stimulant to my imagination back then -- who knows what would have happened if I'd actually seen the movies I thrilled to read about), but I'd never actually seen it unti last night. It was wonderful -- like Two Lane Blacktop, a B-movie that was far too strong in its artistic sensibilities to be forgotten. Curtis and I kept looking at each other at frequent intervals, marvelling at the rather shocking similarities it bore to James's first short film The Knocker, which was also a black and white horror movie about a young woman haunted by a mysterious apparition. We asked him about it later on that night, when we all met up to watch Tarnation, but he'd scarcely even heard of it. Chalk it up to those genius auteur wavelengths in the air, I guess.
I was made painfully aware of my chemical addictions last night, when halfway through Jonathan Caouette's masterpiece my brain started to remind me that it hadn't had any coffee yet that day. By midnight I was racing home to drink a cup and try desperately to fall asleep before my skull compressed on itself.
So now I've got a fresh cup before me and am fully capable of relating how Green Cine got my hopes up this morning when they pointed to this Filmmaker entry discreetly linking to multiple cuts of John Cameron Mitchell's latest directing effort -- but the link doesn't work! I guess it's something to look forward to.
Posted by David Lowery at October 29, 2004 12:43 PM