The Screengrab : manny farber

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Marx Brothers

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

In a provocative piece in the Guardian, Danny Leigh uses the ongoing "Punk 'n Pie" program at BAM to ask, where are the great punk movies? At BAM, as in many a retrospective or critical study, punk movies are movies that deal with punk music as a subject, whether as performance movies or biopics or documentaries or anthropological field trips, or movies that are populated by celebrities and hangers-on from the "scene", such as the now-forgotten Downtown detritus cranked out by '80s filmmakers such as Beth B. and Scott B. and the young Susan Seidelman. Leigh writes that "quite apart from the questionable merits of the films concerned, I've always thought there was something grimly pedestrian about the way such a firecracker cultural moment should be represented by something so drab as a canon at all. And yet wheeled out every so often for an audience of ebbing nostalgiacs are the same old dusty reels, those already mentioned joined by or interchanged with the grim Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, cosy Sex Pistols doc The Filth and the Fury, and/or the various filmic portraits of the Clash, principally the near-unwatchable curate's egg Rude Boy and the Joe Strummer tribute The Future Is Unwritten."

Mind you, it was ever thus with rock music, which in its first flush of exploitable excitement was packaged in a shelf's load of movies that collected performances ranging from the leading acts of the time, bound together with the flimsiest of connective tissue. To see what this kind of movie might look like if it were good--which is to say, if it were made by people who lacked contempt for the music and its audience--the world would have to wait for 1978's American Hot Wax, made at a time when its biggest names, including Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, were, in rock 'n' roll terms, practically senile. (In fact, one of the best ways to tell these movies apart from those made by the greatest punk bands is that the punks, coming along after the official invention of pop culture, tended to get involved with projects that were self-consciously, conceptually screwy. Not content to make a cheesy high school musical for producer Roger Corman, the Ramones agreed to make what was supposed to be a cheeky put-on of a cheesy high school musical for producer Roger Corman, though independent taste tests found it hard to tell it apart from the real, semi-spoofy thing. The idea behind Rude Boy, featuring the more politically minded the Clash, seems to have been to let the guys the fans wanted to see play second fiddle to uncharismatic roadie Ray Gange, the designated stand-in for all the little people out there to whom the band's music means so much. As the hilarious but seemingly well-intended Wikipedia entry for Gange notes, "In his one and only well-known film appearance, Gange displayed a variety of expressions, although some have pointed out that they all look somewhat similar to the one at the start of the film which shows him waking up and looking out the window.")

There are some great rock performance films, but it's hard not to feel a special affectionate respect for those movies that somehow come across as "rock movies" to their core because they seem to embody something essential to the spirit of the music, even if the music in the movies scarcely captures its essence. Thus Walter Hill's The Warriors is a better "rock movie" than Jailhouse Rock, even if nobody in his right mind thinks that Arnold McCullers's version of "Nowhere to Run" deserves to shine the shoes of Martha and the Vandellas'. And the '50s mutli-performer rock film that holds up best today is Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It, not because Tashlin was especially sympathetic to the music but because a man who'd cut his teeth putting Bugs Bunny and Jerry Lewis through their paces had a built-in appreciation of that which was not culturally respectable. (Truth be told, the singing cast member who seems to elicit the highest degree of respect from the director is Julie London, who was more likely to be recruited by NASA than she is to ever be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.) Leigh argues that "if a film has any aspiration at all to being 'punk' then it cannot be about a band - any more than surrealist cinema can be represented only by biopics of Dalí and Breton...Indeed, it's one of the stranger aspects of British punk films that, if it's debatable whether any ever had anything genuinely punk about them, it's certain that none ever captured the sense of punk. Not punk as a mere footnote in the history of guitar rock, but punk as a democratic shifting underfoot best expressed by the misfits in the audience." As examples of films that do catch hold of that snarling spirit, Leigh nominates the Marx Brothers circa Horse Feathers (featuring Groucho's anarchist anthem "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It"), Dennis Hopper's Out of the Blue (which takes its title from Neil Young's tribute to Johnny Rotten, and which a not-yet-detoxed Hopper took over directing after being cast as the heroine's daughter), "the anti-corporate self-immolation of the Monkees' Head; the volatile brevity of Punch Drunk Love and the outsider portraiture of John Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet." He also drops the name of Eraerhead, and there he will get no argument from me.

Punk shares affinities with the concept of "termite art" championed by the late Manny Farber, and traces of the stuff itself can be found in many of his favorites, from the ratty, volatile action films of such directors as Don Siegel and Sam Fuller to the art-conscious apocalypse of Godard's Weekend, which suggests both the splenetic fury of bands such as the Pistols and the icier, critical-intellectual stance of Gang of Four and Wire. (There are echoes of the latter approach in both Alan Clarke's Elephant and more recent films by Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes.) The Ramones recognized Todd Browning's Freaks as kindred spirits, leading the way to the pre-multiplex films of John Waters and also to Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Re-Animator, and all those midnight flicks that were born with one foot in the art house and one in the gutbucket. And of course the aforementioned Luis Bunuel anticipated punk both with the Surrealist shock effects of his earliest work and his unflinching depiction of those clinging to the bottom of society in such films as Los Olvidados. Although a movie that seems punk to its core still comes along every so often--Matthew Bright's Freeway leaps to mind--it's generally easier to think of movies that anticipate the movement than movies made since 1976 or so that reflect its ideals, probably because nothing kills the spirit quicker than deliberately straining to do it justice.

The case of Alex Cox, who probably worked as hard to create a punk cinema as any director working in the last twenty-five years or so, may be instructive. In his first feature, the 1984 Repo Man, he delivered the ultimate sick joke of Los Angeles punk, complete with a self-parodying appearance by the Circle Jerks and a tossed-off homage to Kiss Me Deadly. In Straight to Hell and Walker, he exposed the connections between punk filmmaking and the dusty fever dreams of Sergio Leone and the Sam Peckinpah of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, a director who never saw a scene of blood-soaked carnage that he didn't figure could be improved with just a few more buzzing flies. But when Cox set out to deliberately recreate the hallelujah days of British punk in Sid and Nancy, he made a soft, nostalgic, dishonestly self-pitying film with speeches about the music's importance and Gary Oldman's sweetly sleepy, harmless Sid Vicious. His closest American counterpart may be Penelope Spheeris, whose Decline of Western Civilization documentaries had a sharp, smart edge entirely missing from her attempts to take punk mainstream in such films as Suburbia (1984), a standard-issue misunderstood youth film with a Mohawk, and the highly regrettable Dudes (1987), which set some kind of record for toxic obnoxiousness just by sticking Jon Cryer and Flea in the same film frame. Part of the thrill of punk is that it tends to pop its head out when and where you least expect it. Well, not literally where you absolutely least expect it, because there's not a lot of it in Spheeris's 1994 version of The Little Rascals.

The Rep Report (November 14--21)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Film Society of Lincoln Center pays tribute to the late, great Manny Farber with the kind of celebration every film critic (every film nut, for that matter) has probably dreamed of being held in his honor: a couple week's worth of movies that inspired Farber to kick the theater seat in front of him in happy excitement, and to kick out the jams when he sat down to transfer that excitement to his writing about them. Any enthusiast of Farber's will notice something missing that's essential to their own conception of The Manny Farber Experience, but the programmers have certainly done an admirable job of indicating the wide range of Farber's taste, from the grungy crime movies (Howard Hawks's Scarface, Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground) and suggestive scare flicks (the Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur I Walked with a Zombie) and motor-mouthed comedies (His Girl Friday, Preston Sturges's Christmas in July) that Farber pegged as the pride of old Hollywood to such art-house fare as Resnais's Muriel, Godard's Two or Three Things I know About Her, and experimental films by Michael Snow and Jean-Marie Straub. The double bill of the season just might be Don Siegel's The Lineup, a charged thriller based on a forgotten TV series and starring Eli Wallach as a demented hit man, with the classic Chuck Jones cartoon One Froggy Evening. This Sunday, the program also pairs up two short documentaries inspired by Farber's work: Chris Petit's 1999 Negative Space, which includes interviews with both Manny and his soul brother Dave Hickey, and Untitled: New Blue, Paul Schrader's five-minute look at one of Farber's paintings. Schrader will be on hand to introduce the film, and as an associate of Neil Young's once said of another associate of Neil Young's that boy can flat yap.

Film Forum begins a week-long tribute to director Les Blank, a documentarian whose range of subjects--mainly food, filmmaking, music, and wild women--clearly designate him as one of God's better ideas. Included are Blank's classic tribute to Mardi Gras Indians, Always for Pleasure (1978), whose title could also apply very nicely to his career, as could his 1968 God Respects Us When We Work, but Loves Us When We Dance. Other films included cover the life and work of bluesmen Lightinin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb, Louisiana musicians CLifton Chenier and Michael Doucet, and Flaco Jimenez, as well as garlic, polka, Tex-Mex, and Werner Herzog, seen in the double bill Burden of Dreams, which is about the making of Fitzcarraldo, and the short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, which is literally about what it says it's about. To gorge on this stuff is to come to a fresh understanding of just how thoroughly you've misspent most of your own life.

Also dropping in at the Forum for a week: Charlie Ahearn's 1982 Wild Style, in a spanking new 35-mm. print. Starring a celebrated graffiti artist, Lee Quinones, and shot in New York back in the day when the city had graffiti, Wild Style was a mainstay of cable TV's Night Flight in the late 1980s, and it seems to come back about once every ten years. To be honest, I've never been able to remain focused on it for all of its 82 minutes. But its hardcore fans don't worship at its altar because Ahearn was a master filmmaker or any kind of storyteller; they revere the movie, which includes glimpses of Grandmaster Flash, Fab Five Freddy, the Rock Steady Crew, the Cold Crush Brothers, artist Sandra Fabara, and onetime "downtown scene queen" Patti Astor, because it's a living record of a moment just before hip hop broke wide open, and because Ahearn had the taste, or the good luck, to capture that moment in a way that seemed to anticipate what was about to come. It's practically a federal law that any mention of the movie include the phrase "time capsule."

More pieces of time can be found at Anthology Film Archives, where they're kicking off an eight-film retrosepctive to 86-year-old director Arthur Penn, who I once referred to at this site as "the late" Arthur Penn, only to turn on TCM's Brando documentary to see him chattering away, still alive and looking more like Iggy Pop than ever. The AFA will be running his groundbreaking Bonnie & Clyde as well as some of the less heralded earlier films that offer tantalizing hints of the triumphs to come--The Left Handed Gun starring Paul Newman as Billy the Kid and the excellent film version of The Miracle Worker, but also his film maudit and first collaboration with Warren Beatty, the fascinating, unclassifable failure Mickey One (1965)--and the ambitious, sometimes fumbling attempts to follow it up (Alice's Restaurant, Little Big Man, Night Moves.)

BERKELEY: "Discovering Teuvo Tulio" (November 15-December 4) at Pacific Film Archives offers those looking for something different and obscure (in our neck of the woods, anyway) the chance to catch up on "the wild and willful director of Finnish melodramas from the 1930s and 1940s." Tulio was an actor in silent films, earning the designation "Finland's Valentino." According to the PFA, when Tulio turned director, "he poured an erotic passion worthy of Valentino into the act of filmmaking itself. In his early 'haystack dramas,' Tulio paid homage to the spectacular nature cinematography of Scandinavian silents and retold classic coming-of-age stories, embellishing these with outrageous use of orchestral music and editing to rival Eisenstein (he produced and edited all his films of this era). As war approached, his themes and imagery became considerably darker, more urban and expressionistic. The thread that runs through all these films is the sexual frankness that overturns the very conventions Tulio so consciously resurrects. Surely if every woman who innocently engaged in premarital sex went down the road Tulio maps, prostitution would have accounted for half of Finland’s GDP." Not having seen any of the four films in the program, I can't vouch for any of this, but it sure caught my attention. Apparently Aki Kaurismaki is a big fan, and for all I know, Tulio may turn out to be the Douglas Sirk to his Fassbinder. So if you love The Man Without a Past, The Match Factory Girl and La Vie de Boheme--and if you don't, to hell with you, I say--here's your chance to see where their roots may lie.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 16-22, 2008

Andrew Osborne — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 12:17:00 GMT

Hello? Oh...Mr. Rooney...what? Uh, no...Scott's not here. This is Andrew...Andrew Osborne...yes, sir, I'm another one of the writers here at The Screengrab. You may have read my ongoing autobiographical posts about the summer I spent working for Troma ...no? Well, maybe you read my special 50th birthday salute to the films of Madonna or my review of Vicky Cristina Barcelona? No? Oh, well...

...uh, what's that, sir? Scott Von Doviak? You mean the author of "Tom Cruise Still Creepy, Still Not Funny," "Anna Faris, Honorary Bunny" and "Unwatchable #74: You Got Served"? Oh, well, he's not here right now, but...

...excuse me? You've heard rumors that Scott is singing "Twist and Shout" in the streets of Chicago with his colleague Leonard Pierce, author of "Video of the Day: Sharon Stone Bares All For Paul Verhoeven," "Summerfest '08: Corvette Summer" and that cool story about the state of DC Comics film adaptations? And that Sarah Sundberg, one of the hardworking contributors to "Screengrab Salutes The Top 20 Animated Feature Films" was riding around with them in a bright red Ferrari convertible?

Oh, no, sir, I'm afraid you must be mistaken. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Scott was just in here a few minutes ago...see, he and Paul Clark were both working on their individual Fall Movie Previews and...

...excuse me? Oh...I see. You're saying nobody posted the weekly Screengrab highlight reel on Friday? Well, sir, I'm sure there must be a good reason...in fact, now that you mention it, I remember Phil Nugent telling me his friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who's pretty sure that Scott passed out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious.

But I'm sure if Scott were feeling better, he would have reminded everyone about the memorial for Manny Farber, the cool trailers he saw for Rachel Getting Married, a reexamination of Passion of the Christ and...

...I'm sorry? Could you repeat that, sir? "Les jeux sont faits." Yes, sir, well, I'll be sure to pass the message along if I see him.

Gummi bear?

In Other Blogs: Manny Being Manny

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The film blogosphere paid tribute to Manny Farber this week (Phil Nugent contributed our own obit here) and if that name doesn’t ring a bell, Glenn Kenny has some good advice at Some Came Running. “If you've never read Farber, just stop here and get to it. His collected criticism, in a volume called Negative Space, is one of the touchstone texts of film writing—tough-minded, sharp-eyed, idiosyncratic, often wildly funny, and with a bedrock integrity and aesthetic acuity that even best of contemporary film critics are hard-pressed to approach, let alone match. He is most often cited for coining the phrases ‘termite art’ and ‘white-elephant art,’ two opposed categories. What I found, and find, most valuable in his criticism is his ability to apprehend the entirety of a film—he got it from every angle. He could appreciate a B war picture in the same sense that the guy on the street could, while fully comprehending its value as a work of modern/contemporary art. I'm away from my study, so I can't grab a copy of Space to quote from it willy-nilly. But I can say this: I doubt that Farber was particularly surprised by Godard's Breathless, because his criticism actively anticipated that film.”

David Edelstein has a personal remembrance at The Projectionist. “Manny could seem inscrutable yet was actually hyperprecise, which is why we kept listening, unpacking his phrases, sure that whatever came out, no matter how gnomic, contained multitudes. His writing was compacted, sometimes overly so (he would be the first to tell you that), but the words always quivered with the drive to pin down some aspect of the infinite. Once I made the mistake of saying I thought a film was ‘about’ something. ‘About…’ he said, softly, and glanced at Patricia. ‘How can we say what a film is “about”? There are so many things…’ ”

Jonathan Rosenbaum has an update of a 1993 essay on his eponymous blog. “When we met on campus, Manny—who bore a certain resemblance to Punch in Punch and Judy—hadn’t realized until then that we’d never met before. Back in 1969, when we were both still living in New York, I’d written him asking to reprint two of his articles, on Preston Sturges and Godard, in an anthology I was editing, for $50 each. After receiving no reply I phoned him and got my first taste of his crusty wrath: “Fifty bucks? Do you know how many years Willy Poster and I worked on that Sturges piece?” Weeks later, just before I was due to move to Paris, I wrote him a sincere fan letter saying that I’d just read the Sturges article for the umpteenth time and couldn’t imagine publishing the book without it—that my budget for fees was paltry but I’d double my offer to $100 for the Sturges. A few days later he phoned, quite friendly, accepting the offer.”

A promising new blog called Parallax View weighs in on the new DVD of Orson Welles’ lost film Don Quixote. “From what I know about Welles and the history of the film, Franco’s version is not even an approximation, never mind a reconstruction. There’s no story here, simply a random succession of events and images and a whole lot of narrative detours. But even as a visual record of Welles’ raw footage it’s a travesty. It’s a given that much of the existing rough cut footage is in rough condition, showing the signs of wear and tear from years of tinkering on moviolas and dragging the reels from country to country. But Franco and company have, if anything, compounded the problems with hazy, blurry copies of the master footage and video noise introduced as a result of the project’s most egregious crimes against Welles: the video manipulation of footage to layer images one on another.”

For this week’s List-o-Mania, we turn to Daily Plastic for the Top Ten Loathsome or Laudable Uses of a Zoom Lens. For example, squeezing tears from an emotional interviewee. “And it starts. Her response to the difficult question. The rising action. His heart races. Her chin puckers. His fingers tug the tiny shaft. Her eyes look left and right. She tells her sad story. He moves in closer, close enough to feed upon the tears of wounded subjects. The interviewer tilts her head to the right and nods to keep the subject talking, and then shifts her notepad to the opposite knee so that, when the time comes, she can reach forward and pat the subject's hand, a comforting attagirl for a job well-done. It's a crucial moment. But the squinting man is in charge. His choice to begin zooming now, to draw the viewer into the miserable world of the subject, will govern the edit, will define the scene. When he stops zooming, the scene is over, but not before. It's his shot to get, and his to lose. He stands astride the very earth.”

Manny Farber, 1917--2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:30:00 GMT

A one-of-a-kind eccentric voice whose tastes and opinions left an unexpectedly long shadow across the battlefield of late-twentieth-century movie criticism and geek argument, Manny Farber has died at the age of 91. In such essays as "The Gimp", "Underground Movies", "Cartooned Hip Acting" and the landmark "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art"--originally published in such out-of-the-way venues as Film Culture, City Lights, and Artforum--Farber gleefully pissed on middlebrow attempts to uplift the movies to the level of self-serious kitsch, saving his highest praise for those directors, ranging from Samuel Fuller and Don Siegel to Chuck Jones and Jean-Luc Godard, who "seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn't anywhere or for anything." Farber's embrace of wise-cracking, tough-guy language and a scorn for the self-conscious "pursuit of the continuity, harmony, involved in constructing masterpiece" (so that the "assemblage becomes a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition; far inside are tiny pillows holding up the artist's signature, now turned into mannerism by the padding lechery, faking required to combine today; esthetics with the components of traditional Great Art") that almost borders on nihilism should not be mistaken for philistine thuggery. Farber himself was a painter, often turning out canvasses inspired by his favorite films by Fassbinder and Sam Peckinpah. As a critic, he used words the way the best Abstract Expressionists used color and brushstrokes, boiling his opinions into a steady stream of hard little bullets of impressions and laying them out in a field of poeticized yet slangy language that could at first appear chaotic and off-the-cuff yet, upon close examination, revealed themselves to be the carefully shaped product of a lifetime's thinking about what mattered in the arts. Because Farber was so funny, and his writing so electric, nobody ever needed much convincing that they ought to give his writing that kind of close study.

The "White Elephant" essay, a full-throated expression of artistic preference, begins with a dissertation on Cezanne before veering off into a celebration of those "termite artists" of the movies, such as Laurel and Hardy and the Howard Hawks of The Big Sleep, whose work does not stand before the audience preening its beauty and solemnity of purpose but rather "goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity." Farber's own path of eager, industrious, unkempt activity as a writer can be found in his single collection, Negative Space, which was originally published in 1971; a paperback version was issued under the title Movies, and in 1998 Da Capo brought out a new paperback edition which included a preface by Raoul Walsh (who certainly owed him one) as well as the scarce handful of movie essays that Farber had turned out since the mid-70s, all of them listing his wife Patricia Patterson, as co-author.

New Grindhouse Classics: "Mulberry Street"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The holy grail of a certain kind of movie geek is the low-budget genre picture--crime, sci-fi, or maybe, especially, horror--made by no-name filmmakers who, forced to compensate for their lack of resources with whatever they can come up with in terms of ingenuity and febrile, crackpot ideas, achieves what Manny Farber called "termite art," a strange and living vision that charges down alleys that Jerry Bruckheimer wouldn't venture into if there were strippers in there. Mulberry Street, which played theaters for an instant last year tucked in alongside seven other scare pictures as part of the 2007 "After Dark Horrorfest" and which recently came out on DVD, is a rare example of a movie that gets close enough to achieving grail status for viewers to catch scent of the wine. It's an apocalyptic horror movie that suggestively touches on post-9/11 anxieties without resorting to the kind of explicit speechifying that one encounters in the films of such specialists in ambitious schlock as Larry Cohen. It's also a movie that solves the problem of how to capture the edgy, grungy vibe of the classic New York movies from the seventies and make it seem relevant to the city we know today.

Mulberry Street is set among the people who can barely afford a ticket to the theaters in the more photogenic parts of New York now, who are being crowded out of a place that increasingly seems to have no place for anyone who has to keep up on the price of groceries. The main setting is an apartment building whose tenants are on the brink of being evicted by a development company looking to upgrade the area; the company's billboards are plastered with the message, "The neighborhood is changing" and a picture of the Trump-like company head, gazing down over his latest acquisition like a Yuppie Big Brother. The construction process has apparently set off reverberations that are reaching down beneath the subway lines and bringing to the surface an especially nasty breed of rats, who, biting anyone they come across, turn their human victims into rabid, murderous were-rats. Silly as this sounds, in the movie it plays with a metaphoric logic that's hard to shake off. It's as if gentrification has finally driven what's left of the city's natural essence insane and forced it to fight back. Of course, in fighting back, it mainly strikes the people who are already its fellow sufferers--the people who, as in Katrina, can't afford to get out of nature's way. When all hell is broken loose and Manhattan has been quarantined, a TV news announcers informs us that the mayor will soon be making a speech, "from the Bahamas."

Directed by Jim Mickle from a script he co-wrote with Nick Damici, who plays the hero, an ex-boxer named Clutch, it's a monster movie whose fast-cut editing (by the director) and blurry, often weirdly lovely cinematography (by Ryan Samul) are so effective that it's hard to mind much that they probably developed as a way to conceal the limitations of the special effects/make-up budget. The first rat people we see are bum-like creatures with loose, matted hair that strategically conceals their features, though once things are going good, there's a quick glimpse of a bald, pointy-haired sucker who looks rather like the title character of F. W. Muneau's Nosferatu. (The ending, which features guys running around in protective suits, plays as a double homage to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and his lesser-known 1973 film The Crazies.) Most of the characters are hard-scrabble members of the working poor and self-styled tough New Yorkers; when a young family hustles to get the hell out of the building before the plague engulf them, one urban warrior yells after them contemptuously, "Go back to Connecticut!" (There's also a memorable scene of a heavyset bar owner matter-of-factly chasing a monster out of his place by repeatedly whacking it upside the head with a skillet while hollaring, "And stay out!")

The biggest flaw in the movie is that the casualness-in-the-face-of-chaos tone can get underdone. There are a couple of moments where characters seem bizarrely unmoved by the loss of people they had reason to feel close to, and Clutch, who's expecting his grown daughter's return home after a stint in Iraq and a spell in a military hospital, never betrays the concern you might expect a loving father to expect upon his realization that his kid is out there somewhere in a zombie minefield; he never even comments on it. (The daughter is played by Kim Blair, whose beauty is somehow made only more affecting by her character's facial scars. The standout member of the cast is Ron Brice, who plays Clutch's gay roommate; he knows how to communicate fear and confusion while retaining his character's dignity.) But even when it seems to have a couple of circuits misfiring, Mulberry Street has a look and feel that set it apart from the run of blood-squib operas cluttering up the direct-to-video shelves. Hardcore horror geeks and people nostalgic for the old Times Square should give it a look. Some sane people might want to give it a look, too.