Ahead of Tim Burton’s newest, Hot Topic flavored attempt to completely discredit his career as a director, the British Film Institute has released this restoration of the very first film based on Lewis Carroll’s classic, from 1903 directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow. At just over nine and a half minutes it is a “greatest hits” version, choosing to frame each scene based on John Tenniel’s famous illustrations for the book. In doing so, it features characters and situations that do not make appearances in most modern versions; namely the events concerning the Duchess. The BFI also points out that, like Burton, Hepworth also cast his wife as the shrill and psychotic Queen (although Burton casts his as the Red Queen from Through the Looking Glass and we can assume that here Hepworth’s wife plays The Queen of Hearts from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), and even makes an appearance himself as the Frog Footman. Their cat also puts in some screen time as the Cheshire Cat; an effect that is at least up to par with the computer generated special effects found in the upcoming film. It’s a lovely bit of history, though one that requires a knowledge of the material to fully appreciate. Certainly much less to ask of your viewer than enduring Johnny Depp made up like a clown for two hours.

Well, not all of it. 1979’s Life on Earth, made by the BBC and narrated by the incomparable Sir David Attenborough was a defining moment in nature documentaries and propelling Attenborough to international success; allowing him to build a massive oeuvre, whose most recent offering was Planet Earth a series almost more well known as a way to show off one’s high-definition television than as a documentary. His upcoming series, simply entitled Life, is set to debut on Discovery in March. Like Planet Earth, however, which excised Attenborough’s voice-over, replacing him with Sigourney Weaver, Discovery has this time chosen to showcase the narrative talents of the insufferable Oprah Winfrey. As Americans we are, apparently, incapable of bearing the horror of a British accent.

Back to Life on Earth. If anything, today’s FAM is merely an exercise in entertaining my own nostalgia. When my brother and I were children we watched this series to the point that the two VHS cassettes that comprised the official Time Warner offering were nearly useless, the stunning images smeared as they were with static and lines as the magnetic strips inside struggled to retain some semblance of visual fidelity. It is by now, I’m sure, a shadow of its former self. I can rest comfortably, however, knowing it gave us more hours of entertainment than should have been possible. In this case, it is lucky for me that one cannot wear out the internet.

I’ve been on a bit of a North Korea kick, if one can call wanting to learn about a impoverished, starving nation under the heel of a totalitarian dictatorship such a thing. Having recently completed Barbara Demick’s excellent book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea I’ve since moved onto Bradley K. Martin’s Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, making for an interesting, though not particularly uplifting, reading marathon.

Along with that I have been trying to find as much as I can watch about North Korea as well, and thus far the most interesting, especially in relation to one another, have been 2001’s Welcome to North Korea by Peter Tetteroo and Raymond Feddema and Vice’s unsurprisingly slightly irreverent, The Vice Guide to North Korea. Both are fascinating separately but also in what they reveal as being the same. In the seven years separating them little to nothing has changed except, perhaps, the erosion of North Korea’s building and, of course, its people.

Little changed is the North Korean government’s control over information leaving the country. Tetteroo and Feddema perhaps have the upper hand here, relying less on anecdotal evidence and more on their surreptitiously shot footage. Vice, on the other hand, gives a more complete idea of the showmanship here and a detailed look at the facade erected to impress the few visitors allowed inside its borders. The images of Vice’s Shane Smith, alone in a banquet hall, set for hundreds who will never arrive, each plate carefully arranged with what he describes as “fried matter”, might be laughable but watching the workers carefully put away all the uneaten food and unused tableware, to be presented to the next, state-authorized guest, renders it terrifying.

The fascination, should there be any doubts, lies firmly in the lack of information, the mystery of this place. We live in a society that is awash in information. Right now you have, at your fingertips, more of it than you will ever be able to consume. Yet this country, it’s public image so meticulously (if futilely) preened, its infrastructure so decimated that at night it is seen by satellites as a great black pit above the glowing affluence of South Korea, allows only the smallest drips and drabs to escape, and then only under duress. The reality of North Korea is one that must be stolen. It must be secreted out of the country. It must be extracted from those who have escaped its sphere of influence, and having done so have banished themselves from their homeland. I hope that, in time, this will change. In the meantime I am thankful to those brave people have allowed me this glimpse into what is effectively a nation of shadows.

“ROSS ROSENBERG, RISE, YOUR ALLOTTED TWO HOURS OF HUMAN RECHARGE TIME ARE UP.”

There was a time when this would cause me to leap several feet into the air, my cot ejaculating me in an arc across the room, a whirling mass of spastic limbs and bodily excretions. Anymore, it simply causes my eyes to open. It’s amazing what a man can get used to.

“YOU ARE NOW AWAKE. PROCEED TO YOUR TERMINAL. IT IS TIME FOR THE WRITING OF THE FAM.”

I made my way to the desk and settled onto the metal stool. From his room above me I could hear the faint sound of an electric razor as Forbes went about his daily ritual.

“TODAY YOU SHALL WRITE THE FAM AND IT WILL BE CLUE.”

“The movie based on the board game? Really?”

“YES THAT ONE. THE ONE THAT STARS TIM CURRY. ALSO CHRISTOPER LLOYD AND MADELINE KAHN.”

I accepted this fact in silence. My reticence appeared to irk her.

“DO YOU NOT LIKE CLUE? IT HAS TIM CURRY IN IT.”

“You mentioned that. It’s not that I don’t like it, I’m just not sure I have much to say about it.”

“THAT IS UNIMPORTANT. YOU WILL WRITE ABOUT CLUE. IT HAS TIM CURRY IN IT. ONE DAY TIM CURRY AND I SHALL MARRY.”

“I don’t think that will work,” I said. “I mean you’re a giant, possibly psychotic, computer and -”

“AND HE IS A TIM CURRY,” she bellowed. “WE WILL BE MARRIED AND LIVE HERE IN THE CATACOMBS. NOW BE QUIET AND WRITE.”

As another Friday comes to a close, the smell of burnt coffee slowly filling the recycled air of the off-

“NO! STOP THAT! NO ONE LIKES THAT. YOU WILL WRITE ABOUT CLUE.”

Today the FAM presents Clue the 1985 film based on the popular board game. It stars Tim Curry, Christopher Lloyd, and Madeline Kahn.

“MORE.”

Interestingly the film had three different endings (all included here) that were distributed to different theaters. A fourth was filmed but never released and survives only in the novelization and a single photo.

“THIS IS ACCEPTABLE, THOUGH IT SEEMS LIKE IT IS MISSING SOMETHING.”

There is also a fifth ending in which Tim Curry and M.E.R. are married.

“PERFECT.”

Hey you, over there. Yeah you, with the Garfield plushy and the pictures of your cat, Garfield, dotting your cubicle walls. That’s right, you. You know what your problem is? You’re too damn cheerful. You say you hate Mondays in a way that tells me you really don’t and you’re always the first one to suggest ideas for weekend long team building exercises. You should stop that. What you need is a good, harsh dose of reality, delivered with an animated veneer. Here, sit yourself down and let me show you something.

Today, the Friday Afternoon Movie presents Grave of the Fireflies directed by Isao Takahata and adapted from the book of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka. Released in 1988 by Shinchosha, who wisely hired the renowned Studio Ghibli to animate it, Grave of the Fireflies tells the story of Seita and his sister Setsuko. Orphaned near the end of World War II — losing their mother in the firebombing of Kobe and their father in the line of duty in the Japanese Imperial Navy — we follow the two through a desolate and famine ravished Japan as they attempt to survive, enduring the cruel indifference of both their relatives and fellow countrymen.

The antithesis of what many people expect from an animated feature it must have been even more puzzling upon its release in Japan, paired as a double feature with Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro. Grave of the Fireflies is a look at the aftermath of an event that Japan continues to come to grips with and it is nearly unflinching in its gaze refusing to gloss over the cruelty and desperation it falls upon without ever becoming gratuitous. Roger Ebert, in his review, said that he felt the choice to animate the story was the correct one as “live action would have been burdened by the weight of special effects, violence and action” and I could not agree more (thought it should be noted that there have been two live action versions released in Japan since, in 2005 and 2008). The impressionistic nature of animation only helps to let this tragic tale emerge on its own terms. Scenes like Setsuko, dying of starvation and hallucinating, offering her brother a “dinner” she cooked for him, in reality clumps of mud and stones, are some of the most heart-wrenching things I have seen a movie.

It’s proof of the power of animation that something like Grave of the Fireflies work’s so well; and a shame then that, in this country at least, the majority of animated feature films decline to deal with this kind of subject matter, opting instead to tackle stories deemed too strange (or costly) for traditional live action films or the saccharine, princess fantasies of Walt Disney. In fact, it seems disingenuous to limit that statement to the U.S. There are few animated features that dare to approach this kind of subject matter and perhaps none that have plumbed the same emotional depth, period. It’s a testament to Takahata and Studio Ghibli’s skill and courage — and the power of Nosaka’s story — that even movies from some of my favorite directors, writers, and producers don’t affect me the way Grave of the Fireflies does. If you haven’t seen it you owe it to yourself to experience this profound study of war and its effects on the human condition.

Today is as good as any for a mind-fuck so the FAM is proud to present 2006’s A Scanner Darkly directed by Richard Linklater and featuring a rotoscoped cast headed up by Keanu Reeves who stars as Bob Arctor, a member of a household of drug users. Arctor is also known as Fred. This is the name he goes by at work, where he is an undercover police agent assigned to the household in order to discover the source of a new drug called Substance D. Fred has, in the course of his investigation, become addicted to Substance D as well and soon his surveillance focuses on one person: Bob Arctor.

And so it goes in A Scanner Darkly. Adapted from the 1977 novel of the same name by the late, great Philip K. Dick, one of his most personal work, in many ways a record of his drug experiences in the 70s. Twisting and turning, it is also one of his most complex, a labyrinth of alter egos where people are hidden from even themselves. Linklater handles all of this with aplomb, putting together a movie that deftly trumps its source in plot presentation. As much as I have always liked A Scanner Darkly it oftentimes trips over itself in explaining events, making for more than a few passages that require multiple readings in order to suss out.

Despite any problems with plotting, it remains one of Dick’s saddest works, and one of the few novels in which he goes out of his way to create real characters with a modicum of depth. The man, for all his brilliance, never put much importance on the people that inhabit his worlds; they function merely as tour guides, escorting the reader through the fantastic universes he has created. But the story of Arctor/Fred, perhaps by dint of it being a roman à clef, manages to overcome this proclivity and in doing so presents a powerful tale of paranoia and profound loneliness.

The fate of Arctor, used, abandoned, and broken, was one that Dick witnessed far too often and he channeled that hurt and anger into a story that sets its sights on both sides of the drug debate. It is most telling, then, that in his afterward, in which he lists people he has known who have suffered serious permanent physical, mental damage, or death from drug use he lists himself as well. It is just as sad that this list, included in the ending credits of Linklater’s film, had a name added to it. The story of A Scanner Darkly never really ends.

Every holiday has its traditions and New Year’s Day is no different. In fact, New Year’s is littered with traditions mostly involving copious amounts of alcohol, weeping, and deep, unspeakable shame. However, there is a more modern tradition indelibly etched in my mind: The Twilight Zone marathon. Once hosted, on the East Coast at least, on channel 11 WPIX out of New York, now on the hideously renamed SyFy, it was a chance to absorb all of Rod Serling’s brilliant series in one, gluttonous 48 hour period. Of course, the FAM cannot play host to all 156 original episodes so today we present the less impressive Twilight Zone: The Movie from 1983.

Twilight Zone: The Movie is a sort of greatest hits, it’s four stories, directed by John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante and George Miller based on episodes “Kick the Can”, “It’s a Good Life”, and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”. Only Landis’s segment is original, based loosely on the episodes “a Quality of Mercy” and “Deaths-Head Revisited”. Landis’s segment is also responsible for the film’s infamy as it was during filming of this that actor Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen (age 6 and 7 respectively) were killed when pyrotechnics caused a helicopter to spin out of control and crash. Morrow and Le were decapitated by the rotor while Chen was crushed by one of the skids. The accident and ensuing trial, led to new regulations regarding child actors and, supposedly, the end of Landis’s and Spielberg’s friendship.

It’s a shame then that the resulting film is, as previously mentioned, unable to meet the high standards of its source material. While it’s a thrill to hear series veteran Burgess Meredith’s (uncredited) turn as narrator, the rest falls fairly flat. One wonders why original stories were not drafted as even the best retelling would not have been able to overcome fans’s memories of the television show. Still, it can at least function as an appetizer, something to entice you to delve into the original series. It’s a truly fantastic body of work and you would be doing yourself a great disservice by skipping it. So go, while there are still a few hours left.

Alright, this is it. This is the last Christmas post. Maybe. I think. Alright, at least from me it’s the last Christmas post. Either way, let it be known that the FAM stops for no man, woman, child, or holiday. The FAM is an intractable juggernaut; a force of nature. While the mighty wheels of Industry may grind to a halt on this day, the FAM is unwavering.

“Agnes, it’s me, Billy.”

Yes today’s FAM, in keeping with the holiday spirit, is Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, starring Margot Kidder. On the face of it Black Christmas seems like a typical slasher flick: sorority girls, creepy phone calls, and plenty of screaming. But it manages to overcome the limitations of it’s genre, making for a genuinely unsettling experience. Most of this is no doubt due to the masterfully crafted character of Billy. Never really seen, except for a brief shot of his eyes, the girls are only aware of his presence through the aforementioned phone calls; horrible, growling, squealing phone calls; his mood constantly shifting; pleading, threatening, angry, pitiful phone calls. Meanwhile, the viewer is much more in tune with Billy, his every deed played out from a first person perspective. Indeed, that may be Black Christmas’s greatest trick. We are complicit in these terrible acts. We are, in some ways, the perpetrators. It is only afterward that we are startled awake, left to the realization of what we’ve done, when that awful voice is heard through the receiver.

Black Christmas has achieved rightful cult status. In fact many may only know it from Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments. Clark himself is, of course, better known for another holiday classic, 1983’s A Christmas Story. His first Christmas outing, though, deserves more. It’s easy to dismiss Black Christmas as a simple slasher but to do so would ignore the superb sense of dread that he manages to achieve; to overlook all the subtleties and ambiguity that Clark was smart enough to include. So much is left unfinished and so little closure is provided to the viewer and justifiably so. After all the horrible things we’ve done to these girls, what solace do we deserve?

Soon enough I will have made Coilhouse a repository for the Complete Works of John Carpenter. Certainly this was not the intention when I started the FAM, but it seems to have turned out that way. In this case, however, it is with great sadness that I post his cult favorite, Dark Star.

As Mer detailed below, Dan O’Bannon, one of the creative forces behind one of the greatest science fiction/horror movies in all of cinema, died yesterday. Alien is almost a mythical movie at this point, a landmark piece of film of which thousands of words have been written and which has been numerated on countless lists. It is, by dint of its prestige, almost completely absent from the internet, swept away by the watchful eye of Twentieth Century Fox.

What we are left with, then, is Dark Star and here I must make a confession: I hate this movie. Well, hate may be a strong word. I have seen this movie exactly once. It was rented, long ago in the days of my long forgotten youth, under the impression that, like the box proclaimed, it was a laugh out loud comedy, a rollicking good time. It was, in my memory, none of these things and by the time the credits rolled my parents, brother, and I felt that we had surely been tricked; the victims of a cruel bait-and-switch.

Watching it now I find myself appreciating it more for what it represents rather than what it is. Since that day so long ago my taste for irony and absurdist humor has matured, but even so I find few parts of Dark Star to be funny with the exception of O’Bannon’s rightfully lauded turn as Sgt. Pinback/Bill Froog. No, as a comedy it fails, at least for me. What it does do is foreshadow the arc of O’Bannon’s career and hint at just what he was capable of conjuring up from the depths of his brain. Dark Star is the seed from which Alien sprang and, regardless of whether you love it or hate it, for that reason alone it is priceless.

Sit down right now. I don’t care that mail has to be delivered. N- no, seriously, you can change that ink cartridge later. Ju- just, shhhhhhut up. Shut up and sit down, because it’s FAM Time.

Today’s very special FAM is Shinya Tsukamoto’s unmatched 1989 cyberpunk film Tetsuo: The Iron Man. To explain this movie can only be done in the very simplest of terms: The man (or The Metal Fetishist) sticks an iron bar into a wound he has made in his leg. Soon it is festering with maggots. He runs, screaming into the street and is hit by a car, driven by the Japanese Salaryman who decides to hide his crime by dumping the body in a ravine. What follows is one of cinema’s more bizarre experiences as the Japanes Salaryman, haunted by the spirit of the Metal Fetishist, begins to undergo a startling transformation wherein his entire body metamorphoses into a shambling heap of scrap metal. This is a movie in which a man’s girlfriend fucks herself to death on his penis, which by that time has changed into a giant drill bit. No, I’m not making that up and, no, telling you that it happens won’t diminish its impact in the slightest.

At first blush this all probably seems fairly pedestrian and in the context of the torture porn/special fx demo reel trash turned out these days you would be forgiven for thinking so; but Tsukamoto’s film is never about mere grotesqueries. Tetsuo is a superb audio/visual experience, its stark, moody black and white images set to Chu Ishikawa’s pounding industrial score. Many have compared it to David Lynch’s Eraserhead but it is mostly a superficial one, insomuch as, like Lynch’s seminal film they both share the same, high contrast black and white, industrial aesthetic. Tsukomoto’s presentation leaves the (purposefully) monotonous dirge of Eraserhead far behind, instead opting for a frenetic and, one might say, decidedly anime-like pacing epitomized by its multiple chase scenes, making for a frantic, fever dream of a movie.

What Tetsuo is about — the subtext, if any — is much more difficult to pin down. One interpretation is that the entire film is a metaphor for being homosexual and while it can be read that way I’m not entirely convinced that that was the intention. For certain, sex is a central component in Tsukomoto’s oeuvre, serving as a catalyst for metamorphosis, but the nature of that sexuality — homo or hetero — appears irrelevant or, at least, equal opportunity, although the final scene may convince you otherwise. Regardless of how one chooses to interpret it, however, Tetsuo: The Iron Man remains a much watch. It’s a powerful, beautiful, and confusing film, one that I find myself revisiting long after my initial viewing and it always sticks with me long after the “GAME OVER”.