R.I.P. Mad Magazine & Movie Poster Cartoonist Jack Davis

Jack Davis, an artist whose work I, and many comics and movie fans, grew up on, passed away today at the age of 91. Davis is best known for the over six decades of work he did for Mad Magazine, but he also illustrated many other major magazine covers including those of Time and TV Guide, and contributed art for such memorable record album covers as Johnny Cash's “Everybody Loves a Nut” and “The Greatest of the Guess Who.” 

But as this is a film blog, I thought I'd pay tribute to the amazing movie poster art that Davis produced during the '60s and '70s.

So here are my 5 favorite of his movie poster designs - starting with one that I bet will top most film fan's lists:

THE LONG GOODBYE (Dir. Robert Altman, 1973)

This wasn't the original poster for Altman's unorthodox early '70s Raymond Chadler adaptation - you can see the Dirty Harry-ish first try on the IMDb's page for the film when you click the title above - but after THE LONG GOODBYE's disatrous opening, it was withdrawn and a new advertising campaign for it was divised which included Davis' radical redesign above. Altman puts it like this on a making-of featurette on the film's DVD: “We went to Jack Davis of Mad Magazine and they came up with this ad of this Mad magazine kind of look of all the characters that were in it and we opened in New York and we were a smash hit.”

Sure, the poster makes the movie look like it's a lot wackier than it actually is, but it captures the film's comical counterculture atitude so well that it's more than okay with me. 

IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD (Dir. Stanley Kramer, 1963)

Now this poster reflect exactly how wacky the actually film is. Incidentally, Davis parodied his own work for the 1965 Mad paperback, “It's a World, World, World, World, Mad.”

BANANAS (Dir. Woody Allen, 1971)

THE BAD NEWS BEARS (Dir. Michael Ritchie, 1976)

CRIME BUSTERS (Dir. E.B. Clucher, 1977)

All of these may not be classic movies (I'm looking at you, CRIME BUSTERS) but they all have classic Davis art work. Don't just stop here though, Google image search the man's work - you'll be glad you did.

R.I.P. Jack Davis (1924-2016)

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INHERENT VICE: The Film Babble Blog Review

Opening today at an indie art house near me:

INHERENT VICE

(Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)

In a recent interview on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson claimed he wasn’t a stoner, that he really didn’t get stoned. 

Well, INHERENT VICE, Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 comic-noir novel of the same name, coulda fooled me.

It’s such a rambling, sprawling, shaggy dog story with a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous as The Dude would say, all filtered through hazy clouds of pot smoke that it feels like it could’ve only been made by a filmmaker who’s stoned out of his mind.

Of course, my mention of The Dude doesn’t come from out of the blue. The film’s depiction of a countercultural underdog unraveling connections throughout the seedy underworld of Los Angeles heavily recalls the Coen brothers’ THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998), as well as Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE (1973).

Pynchon’s novel seemed to have those references embedded in it as well, and Anderson puts forth a largely faithful take on the original source material, right down to the exact wording of large chunks of the book’s dialogue.

In his second film for Anderson following 2012’s THE MASTER, Joaquin Phoenix plays pothead protagonist Larry “Doc” Sportello, a long-haired, unkempt sideburns-sporting private investigator living in Gordita Beach, California in 1970. Doc’s ex-girlfriend Shasta (the pretty and appropriately flighty Katherine Waterson) shows up after an absence of over a year, and asks him for his help concerning her current boyfriend, a real estate mogul named Mickey Wolfman (Eric Roberts).

Mickey’s wife (Serena Scott Thomas) and her lover, are working on what Shasta calls “a creepy little scheme” to have her rich husband committed to a mental institution so that they can make off with his fortune.

From there, Phoenix’s Doc gets hired by The Wire’s Michael Kenneth Williams as a member of the “Black Guerilla Family” gang to find a white supremacist, named Glenn Charlock (Christopher Allen Nelson), who happens to be one of Mickey’s bodyguards.

After following a lead that ends up with our extremely high hero getting knocked unconscious at a Massage parlor named Chick Planet, Doc is questioned by his long-time cop nemesis, Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin, going big and succeeding), a thick-necked, flat-topped, hippie-hating hardass member of the LAPD.

Luckily, Benicio Del Toro as slick marine lawyer Sauncho Smilax swoops in to get Doc released, but, unluckily, Shasta and Mickey have completely disappeared into thin air.

As if things weren’t complicated enough, Doc takes on another case that’s possibly related, involving the death of surf-rock saxophonist Coy Harlingen (a whispering Owen Wilson) as his widow Hope (Jena Malone) thinks he’s still alive.

From there, Doc visits with his special lady friend, Deputy D.A. Penny Kimball, played by Phoenix’s WALK THE LINE co-star Reese Witherspoon, gets interrogated by FBI agents (Parenthood’s Sam Jaeger and Veep’s Timothy Simons), and, most amusingly, does cocaine with Martin Short as an coked-up dentist. Doc’s trail keeps leading to some sinister entity called “Golden Fang,” which is either a mysterious ship for running drugs, an Indo-Chinese heroin cartel, and/or a syndicate of dentists. I’m still not sure which.

Making her film debut, indie singer/songwriter Joanna Newsom serve as the film’s onscreen narrator Sortilège, a minor character in the book but here the custodian to descriptions of Doc’s inner thoughts, somewhat surreally I might add.

Which means that one minute, Doc is driving with Sortilège riding shotgun telling us about “the long, sad history of LA land use,” and the next minute she’s gone. The freshness of Newsom's delivery of Pynchon's prose enhances the dry sections of the film considerably.

The fading of the sunny idealistic ‘60s into the scary, smacked out ‘70s is conveyed strikingly through Robert Elswit’s always stunning cinematography (Elswit has shot 6 of Anderson’s 7 movies), which gives both dark, dank interiors and sun-bleached exteriors a great burnt-out look, and the score by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood mixed with well chosen songs by Neil Young, Can, Lex Baxter, and the Chuck Jackson Motown classic “Any Day Now,” perfectly evokes the era as well.

Unfortunately INHERENT VICE is no masterpiece. It’s frustratingly low energy at times with scenes that linger on and on. Many critics are calling it “incoherent vice” (there’s a joke I bet will be made at the Oscars) for understandable reasons, but while I sometimes stared at the screen and thought that it was a meandering mess, I was more often struck by the brilliance of many of its moments.

I’ve seen it twice now, and I enjoyed and “got it” a lot more the second time. Phoenix's performance, which initially bothered me as being half-assed, seemed more nuanced (I could see that he was really using his full ass), and I felt more of a poetry to its slow pace than before.

Being the first ever adaptation of a Pynchon novel – books that many have said are unfilmable - is no small feat, and I can’t imagine anybody doing a better job with this particular material than Anderson.

Folks who aren’t Anderson or Pynchon fans going in aren’t likely to be won over, especially at its long-ass length of 2 and a half hours, but those who are hip to its vibe and can get into a groove with its stoned tone are likely to think it’s a gas, man. Sorry, to lay that outdated lingo on you, but I bet deep down you dig it.

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Get Me A Cat That Can Act!: 10 Great Movie Cats (Live Action)

If you’ve seen any of the trailers, TV spots, or posters for the Coen brothers’ newest film INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (opening wide this Friday) you know that it prominently features an orange tabby cat.

As I live in a home full of cats (both our own and fosters as my wife and I volunteer for the Raleigh cat rescue Alley Cats & Angels), I thought it would be fun to kick off the new year with a good ole top 10 list, or a piece of “listicle linkbait” as some cynical critics call it, this time spotlighting other felines that stole their respective movies.

Of course, some of these cat characters were played by more than one cat but as the Village Voice’s Stephanie Zacharek wrote in her review of INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, “Technically, we’re talking about several cats, but let's look the other way for the sake of movie magic.” Also, as this post’s heading indicates, I’m excluding cartoon or CGI-ed cats. So don’t go looking for Garfield or the Cheshire Cat here. No cats who have overdubbed human voices either - so sorry, Sassy from HOMEWARD BOUND.

So here are 10 Great Movie Cats (Live Action):

1. Jonesy in ALIEN (and ALIENS)

As many critics have called Ridley Scott's classic sci-fi thriller ALIEN a “haunted house in space” premise, it made sense that a cat would be one of the crew members aboard the commercial vessel Nostromo so that there could be some fake-out scares of the “oh, it's just the cat” variety. Jones, nicknamed Jonesy, was officially there to rid the ship of rodents, but he became one of the most memorable of the film's characters. This is especially because he and Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) were the only survivors of the Nostromo's deadly alien encounters, and he even made an appearance in the sequel. For those who can't get enough of Jonesy, there's this fan fiction in the form of a free e-book: “Alien, From The Point Of View Of Jones The Cat” by Anne Billson.

2. Tonto in HARRY AND TONTO

When I first saw the trailer for INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, I was reminded of Paul Mazursky’s 1974 drama HARRY & TONTO, which also featured an orange tabby being carried around New York and across country (although he was often walked on a leash as well).

Art Carney’s Oscar winning role as Harry Coombes, a retired schoolteacher who goes on a cross country trip after his apartment building is demolished, is greatly enhanced by his loyalty to his cat. Interestingly, Carney was far from a cat lover before shooting, but after the film wrapped he told an interviewer that they both got along great, and that “when it was over I wanted to buy Tonto. His trainer wouldn’t allow it.” 

3. Blowfeld’s cat in the James Bond series

007’s arch enemy, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, portrayed by Donald Pleasance, Telly Savalas, and Charles Gray during the classic Sean Connery era of Bond, was always seen stroking a white fluffy Turkish Angora in his lap. We are never told the name of the cat beloved by the head of the global criminal organization SPECTRE, but reportedly a couple of cats named Soloman and Tiddes were used in the three films YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967), ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE (1969, the lone George Lazenby entry), and DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971).

Only once did Blofeld and his cat appear (neither played by any previous participant) in the Roger Moore era, in the pre-credits sequence of 1981’s FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, but the evil genius was never called Blofeld because of legal reasons. These same legal reasons amounted to a competing Bond movie by a rival production comapny, 1983’s NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN, in which Max von Sydow’s Blofeld stroked yet another fluffy Turkish Angora. 

Showing how much of an impression the cat made on pop culture, a parody of Blofeld’s pet was included in the Mike Myers AUSTIN POWERS films (themselves parodies of the Bond series and the entire ‘60s spy genre): a hairless Sphynx named Mr. Bigglesworth, the beloved cat of Blofeld lookalike (and satiric equivalent) Dr. Evil.

4. Don Vito Corleone’s cat in THE GODFATHER 

In his commentary on the DVD and Blu ray of the 1972 gangster classic, director/producer/writer Francis Ford Coppola explains how Marlon Brando's iconic character came to have a furry friend on his lap: “It's interesting - the cat in Marlon's hand was not planned for. I just saw the cat kind of running around the studio, and I just took it and just put it right in his hands without a word. I said ‘here Marlon,’and he, uh, of course, he loves children and animals and he immediately took to the cat. And the cat took to him and it became part of the scene - not at all planned, just a random idea.”

5. “Cat” in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S

  
The unimaginatively named Cat is yet another orange tabby that stole the show as Holly Golightly's (Aubrey Hepburn) cat in the 1961 classic. 

6. The Black Cat in THE BLACK CAT 

It's about time a black cat made the list, and who better than the creepy cat title character in the 1934 Universal horror classic THE BLACK CAT? As this was way before the internets, not much is known about the cat, who seemed to be suggested by the Edgar Allan Poe short story of the same name. There were a bunch of remakes (even back then they were remaking the Hell out of horror flicks), but let's just stick with the first and best one.

7. This little kitten in LA DOLCE VITA

One stand out scene in Federico Fellini's 1961 classic had Anita Ekberg playing with a tiny kitten that she found walking the streets of Rome. One could say she reduces the kitty to a fashion accessory but it's a cute scene nonetheless.

8. Mr. Jinx in MEET THE PARENTS

On the audio commentary for the hit 2000 comedy, Ben Stiller asked man of few words Robert De Niro what he thought of his toilet using cat co-star, who was played by two five year-old Himalayans. De Niro: “I like cats. Cats is good.” Well put, Bob.

9. Phillip Marlowe's cat in THE LONG GOODBYE

Yep, another orange tabby. Elliot Gould isn't able to hold on to his cat in the 1973 detective thriller (of sorts) for long as director Robert Altman put it on the “Rip Van Marlowe” featurette on the film's DVD: “The cat was around as long as it got fed. But he didn't get fed - that's the end of the cat.” The cat exits the apartment's window, and the film, when Elliot's Marlowe tries to pull one over on him by putting the label of his favorite food on a can of a generic brand.

10. A cat extra in DAY FOR NIGHT

The heading of this post comes from this scene in François Truffaut's 1973 Oscar winner DAY FOR NIGHT, in which a crew member on the film-within-a-film can't get a cat extra to hit its mark and orders: “Get me a cat that can act!”

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