Hello!

Yes, we usually don’t post on Mondays. The CineSavant Page is going dark for a few days. Nothing sinister, negative, or suchlike, so no need for concern.

New reviews will still be posted at Trailers from Hell on the normal days Tuesday and Saturday. It’s just that they won’t be promoted here or on my Facebook page for a couple of spins of the wheel, maybe the last day of April.

The place to check on Tuesday and Thursday will be my CineSavant Archives Page at Trailers from Hell. Everything that gets posted at TFH shows up there instanfry… indstilly… right away. In other words, a new review should be up some time tomorrow, Tuesday the 22nd.

Sorry for the break. DVD Savant and CineSavant have been up for 24 years and 8 months without a whole lotta interruptions. Not that we can’t be tempted away…

Watch this space too … The CineSavant Column will be back very soon.

Oh, I almost forgot. Does CineSavant need to be more aggressive, confrontational?  Here’s  Sierra Charriba saying hello.  ↗  His message is pointless but he has the right attitude:  “CineSavant will be back!  Who you send against me now?”

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Nothing on the Column item docket today — except for goofy online videos old and new … which people keep saying they like.

First up is a homemade video mashup from ‘Tvcrazyman’ — a clever editorial job that tasks The Man of Steel with defeating an armada of invading flying saucers. Ray Harryhausen worshippers may complain, but hey, re-editing the effects master’s work is always rewarding.

Fun is fun:

Up second is an old friend that’s forever winning new fans. Posted by ‘homemadespots’, it’s a musical excerpt from the 1965 Indian murder mystery-musical Gumnamm. A clip of the dance number shows up in Terry Zwigoff’s  Ghost World, just long enough to retard one’s consciousness by two or three evolutionary levels.

This one never gets old. The mindless, mind-warping music and the hyperfrenetic dancing are enough to shake one’s brain loose. The earworm guitar riffs will take possession of your frontal lobe for at least a week.

The choreography feels like a metaphor for modern life: people are bombarded by sub-atomic particles, just like David Byrne. It looks so frantic … psychologically speaking, the dance feels like a logical reaction to current national events.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Michael McQuarrie finds another good Internet Archive item. It’s an episode of the old PBS TV show Frontline. To explain, PBS was this great public-supported TV station that presented all manner of education and public interest programming, including original productions like Frontline that offered fine documentaries with journalistic integrity. Exactly what happened to public broadcasting is an entire different discussion.

The beautifully produced The Monster That Ate Hollywood is about the ‘corporatization’ of Hollywood. Produced in 2001, the process had been underway for decades, but it’s nicely spelled out, with excellent celeb interviews and relevant film clips.

Frankly, it’s hard to imagine anything produced about Hollywood that’s this good — most studio-based projects are so thoroughly corporatized, that anything not selling a product is pushed aside. We should know, having worked on video featurettes and docus for so long … starting in the late ’90s, the attorneys kept a close watch on was shown and spoken. What you wanted to say didn’t matter, what the piece said about their product did.

These are not just companies, says Peter Bart, they’re Nation-States, that want ‘Risk-Averse’ movies.

The final joke is the writer’s credit on the show …. Alan Smithee.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Joe Dante circulated this Click Americana page from March 5, 2025. It’s a round-up of facts and insights about our American Drive-In Movie phenomenon — where it started, how it developed, and how its boosters thought it would never end.

There are photogenic images of Drive-Ins on view, but also a lot of shop talk from an article within the article — Charles R. Underbill Jr’s assessment of the state of all things Drive-In, from 1950. When WW2 ended there were only 60 of the things, but in five years over a thousand were constructed. Only a few hundred are left today.

And Michael McQuarrie, bless him, comes up with another rewarding link, one I’ll be going back to myself.

It’s from the Internet Archive and it’s simply called ‘The Tarantino Collection.’ It’s described as a collection of film reviews and writing, most of which appeared on the Beverly Cinema website. It says they were written between 1982 and 2022 … a goodly chunk of time.

Tarantino is always a good read — his tastes and knowledge are refined, and his comments are seldom predictable. His 3 or four pages on Bogdanovich’s  Targets were an excellent start.

There’s an index but you have to peck your way through the pages to find individual topics. We like it.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

What, another atom bomb-related movie?  It’s a Michael McQuarrie find, a twenty-minute documentary produced by the Air Force for the Atomic Energy Commission, on a series of bomb tests at the Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1948.

Screenwriter Carey Wilson is listed as the narrator. Could he have tweaked the narration as well?  The tone of the writing matches the MGM short subjects where Wilson’s voice is frequently heard.

Only  Peter Kuran would know if better materials for this short subject are lost, as this looks like a 16mm dupe. We’ve seen some of these shots of men at electronic equipment, repurposed for science fiction movies (in better condition). That narration script is very well done, with no thoughtless or extreme remarks to exploit as madness in  The Atomic Cafe. Operation Sandstone is three separate detonations. The opening title card looks like a birth announcement for a new baby.

The final speech is quite a poetic mouthful, however:   “So can it be with the energy Man has created. The road is open, a road which may show us the cure for cancer, a road which may enable us to produce heat, and power and new metals with atomic furnaces. New fuels, new ways to nourish the soil, and correct vitamin and mineral defiencies in the very food we eat.”

Yeah, but the only aim we see is to make bigger and better bombs …

Thanks for reading!