Movies & Media

Once again Film Forum outdoes itself with a wonderful program of dual-projection 3-D movies sans anaglyphic viewers. For the layman, that means gorgeous prints without the red/blue glasses. I caught ‘The Mad Magician’, featuring, as was required of B-grade horror-schlock from that time, Mr. Vincent Price.

If you only saw him in later years, it’s easy to forget Vincent Price had the build of a quarterback and height of a basketball player. In this film, described as a ‘low-rent ‘House of Wax’, he plays a magic show prop-builder for a cruel boss who stole and married his now-ex-wife. Denied a chance to shine on stage, he snaps, and subsequently kills again and again to hide his crimes. There’s plenty of ‘comin’ at ya!’ 3-D effects, including water squirted out at the audience and a fight where objects are thrown more than punches, usually directly at the camera.

For sheer 3-D exploitation though, nothing topped the Three Stooges short preceding the movie, ‘Spooks’. Foot-long needles, squirting water, flamethrowers, knives, axes, pies, all were shot out at the audience, with a healthy helping of angry gorilla and physical abuse thrown in. Admittedly, it’s not the Stooges at their best (Shemp’s looking a little rougher for the wear), but the charm of an added dimension makes it work.

It’s hard to state without being able to show how amazing Film Forum’s 3-D setup is. The theater’s size and distance make for a perfect experience of the intended depth of field, and the lack of color filters emphasizes the space you’re seeing on screen, without modern movies’ loss of brightness and clarity (not to mention Film Forum doesn’t have modern vinyl screens, which also dilute image quality. Hey, if it’s good enough for Martin Scorsese it’s good enough for you).

This fellow greeted me on the way in and out, and reminded that right after the 3-D Classic screenings end, the William Castle screenings BEGIN! Percepto! Emergo! The Coward’s Corner! ALL WILL BE PRESENTED AT FILM FORUM! That’s right, they’re even wiring up the seats for ‘The Tingler’ so you too can ‘Scream! Scream for your lives!’

En route home this was all over the subway:

This ‘Jim Joe’ is quite the upstart. The tag started appearing in Bed Stuy and the Lower East Side here and there, on a dumpster and the occasional wall. In less than a month they were all over Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, and now something this scale!

Lest you think all graffiti is dudes writing names on stuff, here is a tagged Fibonacci sequence. Yep.