Saturday, December 18, 2021

SMOLDERING EMBERS

 

Buy it now! A rare perspective of, so far as my estimation goes, one of the most important acts of putting to film in the history of the art form.  Chock full of goodies, it is a chronicle of the making of Tobe Hooper's Spontaneous Combustion, no longer worthy of the subtitle "a folly in the making," and so can be classified in the proper library section of a celebration, one about one's relationship to an act of creation.  A natural part of the Spontaneous Combustion extended half-life, an impossibility of atoms reserved only for great artists and genuine enigmas, how Stan possibly could have known is a question for him (and which you may possibly find an answer in the book)!

Friday, December 17, 2021

Review of 'American Twilight' by Thomas Puhr

    "We're all just victims of the times."

(The character of Pam in the original shooting script of 'The Texas
Chain Saw Massacre')

In lieu of my own (unwritten) rundown of the new American Twilight collection of essays, I'm grateful someone else has taken it upon themselves to provide an intended overview of the book and demonstrate the breadth of both: a) the spectrum of pieces themselves, and b) what they reveal of Hooper's filmography: that, while clear now after bated time, the breadth of the works together has always been a vital continuum, duly, and first, showing us how one can meld artistic expression, current trends, and an osmosis of societal factors, and then, second, patiently waiting for its time that it can make its most needful impact.

'The House That Hooper Built - American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper,' review by Thomas Puhr

American Twilight shows a group of people being willing to put the work in to advance an unusual but important perspective, and I for one, who is not an academic by any means, hope to advance it myself in ways that hopefully do not suffer from my lack of a formal discipline.  For now, we have the acceptance that this is a conversation between multiple people that is worth having.