Joe's View

Novelist and Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Lisa Scottoline wrote a funny piece for the paper last week on deciding to forget about New Year’s resolutions in favor of making a list of personal quirks she plans to hold to in 2010.

Lisa calls them UnResolutions and the one that really caught my eye was Number Two: “I resolve to keep watching the same movies over and over, because I love them…I have seen ‘The Godfather’ probably 145 times, yet I watch it every time cable shows a marathon. Bottom line, one of the great things about living alone is that no one is around to say, ‘You’re not going to watch ‘The Godfather’ again, are you?’”

I think I’ve seen “The Godfather” even more times than Lisa — and there have probably been hundreds more occasions where I’ve only been able to watch 15 or 20 minutes of the gangster classic on cable before I had to do something else.

I don’t have a problem with committing “The Godfather” to memory — it has to be among the half dozen or so greatest American movies — but what worries me is the way I often cannot resist another viewing of an indefensibly bad movie.

If “Road House” or “Valley of the Dolls” or “The Sandpiper” turns up on TV, nine times out of ten I can’t resist watching. The over-the-top dialogue, the bad acting, the crazy world view presented in a terrible movie can be just as compelling as another visit with the Corleone clan.

A few nights ago I used up another 90 minutes of my limited time on this orb marveling at the sheer awfulness of a little-known 1981 thriller, “The Fan,” in which Lauren Bacall (above) plays Broadway star Sally Ross, whose life is threatened by a deranged fan played by Michael Biehn (below).

Between the shooting of the film in 1980 and its release in the fall of 1981, “The Fan” became an embarrassment to the studio that made it — Paramount — when John Lennon was killed by one of his stalker fans and then President Reagan was shot by a crazed fan of Jodie Foster.

With the passage of time, the scandal surrounding the movie was forgotten, and “The Fan” drifted into obscurity (suffering the indignity of having its title lifted for a terrible 1996 Robert De Niro vehicle).

Now, the picture can be savored as a bizarre time capsule of a long-vanished era on Broadway (the first scene takes place outside the Morosco Theatre, which was razed a few years later to make way for a Marriott hotel) and as a behind-the-scenes view of a type of musical that doesn’t exist anymore — the “star vehicle” crafted around a star who can’t really sing or dance.

In the 1960s and ’70s, a host of movie ladies — ranging from Katharine Hepburn to Melina Mercouri — decided to star in Broadway musicals, with mostly disastrous results.

Bacall was luckier than her peers to find two shows that were very cleverly constructed to hide her musical deficits — “Applause” and “Woman of the Year.” The pickings were so slim on Broadway during those theater seasons that Bacall won two Tonys for best actress in a musical.

So, in “The Fan” ex-Hollywood film star Sally Ross’s preparations to make a musical comedy debut in a show called “Never Say Never” become true to Bacall’s real life in a hilariously unintentional way.

The film was shot entirely on location — so the early 1980s theater district street scenes are fascinating to look at now — but the plot is risible in the extreme.

Michael Biehn plays a handsome 20something guy with a heterosexual passion for the 50-year-old Broadway star — he doesn’t want to become her pal and hang out in a theater district piano bar discussing the fine points of Stephen Sondheim’s work, he wants to have sex with her.

The premise is so bizarre that you wonder how the script could have been shot as written and Biehn cast in the role.

The craziness of the plot is one of the things that makes the movie irresistible, however. Neither Sally’s long-suffering secretary (Maureen Stapleton) nor her movie producer ex-husband (James Garner) ever asks the most obvious question, “This unhinged show queen is straight?”

“The Fan” takes us through the rehearsals and opening night of a Broadway show that is every bit as weird as the one John Travolta works on in “Staying Alive.” There doesn’t seem to be any story in the musical and Bacall struts around belting out one godawful song after another (“Hearts, Not Diamonds” brings the audience to its feet, cheering).

“The Fan” doesn’t get any better with repeat viewings, but it does get funnier.

The gulf between movie hits and flops is wider than ever these days.

The other night at a local multiplex large crowds were pouring into one of the auditoriums featuring the 3D blockbuster “Avatar” while “Me and Orson Welles” played to an audience of three (me and my two companions — a fellow reviewer and a young filmmaker).

There is no good reason for Richard Linklater’s charming bio-pic to be one of the year’s most notable failures. It’s a very entertaining look back at Orson Welles as he was preparing his legendary modern-dress stage production of “Julius Caesar,” with a fantastic performance by Christian McKay (above) as the genius director a few years before he made movie history with “Citizen Kane” (1941).

The “me” in the movie — a high school drama student who lucks into a small role in “Julius Caesar” — is played by teen fave Zac Efron (below), who is very good in the movie.

The casting of Efron as Richard Samuels might be one of those seemingly smart commercial moves that end up backfiring on the producers of a film.

The hip art house crowd that loved earlier Linklater films such as “Slacker” (1991) and “Dazed and Confused” (1993) would probably be put off by any film featuring the star of the Disney “High School Musical” series.

And, Efron’s teen girl following must have figured out in advance that this was a 1930s period piece in which Efron did not dance and sing. Efron is clearly a fine young actor but it might take him a few more years to break out of his teen idol straitjacket (remember how long it took Tom Hanks to move beyond “Bosom Buddies”?)

“Me and Orson Welles” has been well reviewed in most quarters — and there is a very slim chance that the acting branch of the Motion Picture Academy might nominate McKay in the supporting actor division — but it took more than a year for the movie to be picked up for theatrical distribution.

Linklater and the cast appeared at a Toronto Film Festival premiere in 2008 where none of the major studio art house subsidiaries expressed any interest in the picture (a shocking event considering the subject matter and Linklater’s status within the independent film movement).

“Me and Orson Welles” will, no doubt, be gone from most U.S. theaters before the new year begins, but it is definitely worth seeking out before it vanishes into a DVD limbo.

It never ceases to amaze me how many good writers are working in the thriller genre these days.

Since so many of the best authors work on a book-a-year pace, it can be hard to squeeze in a new writer when you want to read the latest novel by Lee Child, Daniel Silva, Sandra Brown, Christopher Reich, Lisa Scottoline, Joseph Finder, etc. etc.

But, boy am I glad I found the time to read “Altar of Eden,” the new James Rollins novel that William Morrow is publishing today.

The book reads like a blend of the real science of the Michael Crichton technothrillers with the larger-than-life organized evil of a vintage James Bond novel by Ian Fleming.

“Altar of Eden” opens in Iraq with the destruction of the zoo in Baghdad unleashing some horrible animal experiments gone awry that were funded by a private U.S. military contractor.

The scene shifts to New Orleans and the book’s wonderful protagonist, Lorna Polk, a veterinarian working in a lab specializing in saving endangered species.

A shipwreck unleashes one of the retrieved Baghdad experiments — a super Jaguar with much larger teeth and much more intelligence — and Lorna becomes part of the team assigned to capture and study the strange mutation.

Rollins orchestrates the suspense brilliantly and adds on a strong human  drama when Lorna is forced to collaborate with a Border Patrol agent named Jack Menard with whom she shares a tragic personal history.

The tension and the scope of the horror keep growing as Rollins reveals more of the awful “Baghdad Project” and we learn that much of the experimenting is designed to create a race of super soldiers.

Lorna and Jack eventually find themselves trapped on a Caribbean island with evil madmen who make Dr. No look like Mary Poppins.

“Altar of Eden” is my first Rollins novel and it is good to know he has a backlist of 11 thrillers that I can start working my way through in 2010.

HBO pulled the plug on its “Rome” series in 2007 after only two seasons, but I didn’t catch up with the addictive show until HBO Video sent me the recently released “complete series” package.

Now that winter is upon us, it’s nice to have some good DVD sets to curl up with over the long and snowy weekends we have ahead of us. “Rome” has more heft than most HBO series — it has the period detail and epic scope we expect from good historical drama — but it is also packed with the juicy sexual elements that have become standard in the cable network’s original programming.

The show was a co-production of HBO and the BBC budgeted at well over $100 million — reportedly the most expensive series in television history. The reviews and viewership were strong, but the financial model simply didn’t work for non-commercial television.

The mix of the personal and the historical elements in “Rome” reminded me of one of the great TV achievements of the 1970s — the British production of “I, Claudius” that caused a sensation when it was shown on the PBS “Masterpiece Theater” series in 1977.

There is something wonderful about the TV serial format when the material is as strong as “Rome.”

The show follows two soldiers (above) Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson) whose paths cross with the high and mighty — including Julius Caesar (Ciaran Hinds) and Mark Antony (James Purefoy, left) — as well such lesser known figures as Caesar’s mistress Servilla (Lindsay Duncan) and Caesar’s cunning, sexual predator niece Atia (Polly Walker).

“Rome” is big and complex but it’s not heavy. The personal stories dominate — some verge on soap opera but keep us watching — and there are surprising infusions of black comedy (in episode six, Atia gives Servilla a shocking sex toy).

It’s too bad that HBO hasn’t found a way to justify the higher cost of series set in the past. “Rome” joined “Deadwood” and “Carnivale” on the list of the network’s noble, time-traveling failures.

Shirley MacLaine has always made fun of the B-level British producer Lew Grade, who convinced the actress to do a disastrous, short-lived TV series in the late 1960s (“there’s high grade and Lew Grade,” she wrote in one of her memoirs).

But, thanks to her TV deal with Grade, MacLaine was able to get a greenlight for a pair of theatrical movies of her choice in 1970; the result was two of MacLaine’s best dramatic performances before “Terms of Endearment” nabbed her an Oscar in 1983.

The first picture, “Desperate Characters” (1971), was a faithful adaptation of the acclaimed Paula Fox novel about a couple whose marriage buckles after they decide to become early gentrifiers in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn.

“Desperate Characters” has been available on video for several years, but the second film in MacLaine’s deal with Lew Grade, “The Possession of Joel Delaney” (1972), didn’t appear on DVD until earlier this year.

Based on a novel by Ramona Stewart, and directed by Waris Hussein, the film is one of the best of the many urban supernatural stories that followed in the wake of “Rosemary’s Baby” in 1968.

“Possession” is about a wealthy divorced Manhattanite Norah Benson (MacLaine) who slowly comes to the realization that her younger brother Joel (Perry King) might be possessed by the spirit of a psychotic Puerto Rican he befriended while living in a hovel in the East Village.

The woman finds out that the Puerto Rican was suspected of several unsolved murders in the city and begins to fear her brother is picking up where the dead man left off.

The movie adds a suggestion of incest to the brother-sister relationship that isn’t in the novel, but this is a minor weakness in an otherwise creepy and well-acted tale of the supernatural.

What adds to the film’s entertainment value now is the portrait of New York City teetering on the brink of chaos as crime and poverty spiked at the start of the 1970s.

Norah is comfortably ensconced in her East Side townhouse when the film begins, but as she tries to figure out what is wrong with her brother she has to venture into collapsing parts of the city she has never seen before. “The Possession of Joel Delaney” becomes a horror movie about class differences in New York City.

MacLaine is daringly unsympathetic through much of the film, playing a woman who doesn’t hide her disdain for those who don’t have money or social clout. The tone Norah takes toward her Puerto Rican maid Veronica (played by the terrific New York stage actress Miriam Colon), and her other social inferiors, gets a big payoff at the end with a sick joke freeze-frame worthy of Brian DePalma.

The January Vogue has a neat retro 1960s feel thanks to the “Youthquake 2010” banner headline and a wide array of stories and pictures focusing on the way pop culture and fashion are mixing today. It’s a breath of fresh youthful air that will introduce the magazine’s readers to bands such as Vampire Weekend (above), The Horrors and Chester French (bottom); rising actors Aaron Tveit and Carey Mulligan; and the hot L.A. chef Travis Lett.

It was Vogue under the leadership of Diana Vreeland in the 1960s that helped shepherd the counterculture into the mainstream when the brilliant and eccentric editor decided to youthen up a somewhat stodgy magazine.

Vreeland coined the term “Youthquake” when she took over Vogue in 1963. She was referencing the pop culture boom in England — fueled by the young and the hip — that was revolutionizing film (“Tom Jones,” “From Russia with Love”), music (The Beatles) and fashion (Twiggy, Mary Quant).

Within a few years, however, the “Youthquake” would be shaking this country’s pop world down to its foundation thanks to the San Francisco music (and hippie) scene; what was happening in downtown Manhattan with Andy Warhol and his followers (below); and the Woodstock music festival in 1969.

Because the massive baby boom generation was just moving into its teens, there were major commercial considerations at work in a shift to stories and photos aimed at much young readers than the mass circulation magazines of a decade earlier.

In place of the stars of the previous generation who tended to be in their 30s or 40s at the peak of their fame (Doris Day, John Wayne), most of the “Youthquake” stars were in their 20s.

Vreeland risked alienating her older readers when she put Twiggy and Edie Sedgwick on the cover of Vogue in the 1960s, but she brought new consumers into the tent.

Vreeland had photographers Richard Avedon and Irving Penn turn their lenses on The Beatles, Barbra Streisand and Mia Farrow among other icons of that long ago era.

The baby boomers have been more or less in charge of pop culture for the past 40 years, but that is all changing thanks to aging and new technologies that much of the over-50 crowd still can’t get their heads around.

The current youth generation might not be as big as the baby boomer demo — or have its 1960s and 1970s buying power — but they have a new and immense pop culture networking clout that they are literally holding in their hands.

How smart of Vogue and photographers Steven Meisel and Norman Jean Roy to recognize a major cultural shift in the January issue of the brand new decade.

For an American viewer, the latest film by Korean director Hong Sang-Soo could be called “Culture Clash x Two.”

“Night and Day” is about a 40-year-old Korean artist stranded in Paris for a few months while he waits for a drug charge back home to go away.

Seong-nam Kim was caught smoking a joint with an American tourist but fled the country before charges were filed.

The married man lands in a Paris rooming house populated by Koreans and we follow him as he tries to kill time in between phone calls home to his distraught wife.

The movie has a distinct casual style that makes it impossible to predict what might happen in the next scene. “Night and Day” finds humor in the fish-out-of-water story, but the dominant tone is melancholy displacement.

Hong Sang-Soo brings a fresh eye to Paris, avoiding the postcard monuments in favor of teeming side streets and Asian restaurants where expats gather.

Yeong-ho Kim gives a remarkably natural performance in the central role, hiding the character’s feelings in scenes with other people and then erupting in tears when he is alone. We never feel like we’re watching an actor.

The style of the film is so low key and yet so intimate that we aren’t shocked when the husband asks his wife to have phone sex with him one night — the surprise, considering his loneliness and desperation, is that he waited so long.

“Night and Day” has no music score or other melodramatic embellishments and runs almost two-and-a-half hours, so some viewers will find it “slow.” But I enjoyed the realistic pacing and the absence of judgement of the protagonist — I can’t say that I understood the man completely at the end of the movie but I enjoyed the journey Hong Sang-Soo took me on.

“Night and Day” isn’t opening in U.S. art houses this week. Instead it was unveiled Wednesday by IFC Films through cable on-demand services around the country (including Cablevision, Comcast, Cox, Time Warner and Bright House). This is the same innovative U.S. release platform IFC used for two of this year’s best foreign releases, “Gomorra” and “Hunger.”