ATTENTION, FOLLOWERS & READERS—TAKE THE TEST!!! (One of Ghidrah’s Three Heads Commands You!)

Greetings Friends, Followers and Regular Readers of

The United Provinces of Ivanlandia!

My film-centered blog LERNER INTERNATIONAL, and Ivanlandia’s younger fraternal site, has posted its first “Film Test,”

the “Favorite That’s Not” Quiz—in other words, “your favorite film that’s not ____.”

Only 21 questions, very genre-centric and lots of fun!

(Illustrated with your favorite kaiju B-listers! Just like here! That’s Ghidrah saying “Hi” above!)

Please participate! It’s only a hyperlink away!

Looking forward to your answers!

Thank You!

Ivan of Ivanlandia

[More Japanese “man in monster suit” second-stringers below: Enjoy!]

Horror Movie Posters (and A Pictorial Bribe for Chef Steve)

Dear Steve Albini,

As a big fan of your cooking blog, Mario Batali Voice—your advice about cooking pork was really helpful; adding apples to the pot was the secret ingredient as far as I’m concerned!—I’m horribly let down that your recipe output has diminished so much as of late, and your blog has only been updated twice since February, when a semi-regular posting schedule was maintained.  

Of course, I get it: You’ve got bills to pay, a full-time business to run, family and friends, musical projects to supervise—

and sometimes managing a blog seems so damn unrelentingly pointless and unrewarding…

But I’m a greedy, selfish blog-reader-foodie, and I want more of your witty insights, baseball analogies and frank, no-nonsense cooking advice delivered in a stylish but conversational manner!

Y’know, if you don’t have any time to sit and type up a missive, maybe just scribble some notes on a cocktail napkin, scan it in, and publish the jpeg in Mario Batali Voice…

For some reason, I think you’re a fan of horror movies, so in addition to it being the Spooky Halloween Season, that is another reason for me to post an eclectic group of one-sheets (in almost alphabetically order it seems; hmmm....how'd that happen?) promoting [cue movie announcer voice:] “the frightening, horrifying and disturbing!”

(However, if you’d rather have a posting of cute kittens, I’ll do it—just let me know…It’s the only kind of bribe I can afford, but it’s still a bribe!)

Thanks for “listening,” enjoy the movie posters, get back to the kitchen, and please make sure to visit my other site LERNER INTERNATIONAL for further observations and explorations of the Cinema of Weirdness*.

Have a Happy Halloween,

—Ivan

The “I”’s Have It! {An Exquisite Corpse of Subtitles and an excuse to promote LERNER INTERNATIONAL!}

Before we roll on with today’s Exquisite Corpse,

a very “I”-centric one—can anyone guess why I’ve included this pic of McGoohan in his most famous role, and why this scene from this episode? And why is it included as part of the introduction to this Exquisite Corpse (more accurately a collage, but I’m taking poetic license)?

A special prize of a DVD to the first correct response! (Haven’t figured out the DVD yet, we’ll discuss later…)—

And now…

The National Film Board of Ivanlandia would like to refer you all to

LERNER INTERNATIONAL,

our new review-centric brother site—which has tackled, among so many other things:

Prometheus (Dr. Shaw is the villain!),

looked back at Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite (focusing on Burt Young, the shlub assassin with the soul of a poet) and pointed out the links between Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf and Kubrick’s The Shining—and much, much more!

Currently LERNER INTERNATIONAL—go ahead and click the link, you know you want to; first one’s free, you won’t get hooked—is celebrating Sci-Fi June, looking at the films that intersect in the Venn Diagram of science fiction and The Cinema of Weirdness!

Martin Amis’ only script was a flop then and still DVD-MIA, but time has been kind to it; and it deserves another look;

Rollerball: the missed opportunities;

Monster Zero (constraints from genre mash-ups force the aliens to act stupid); and more!

With even more on the way!

For the future,

LERNER INTERNATIONAL will be conducting on-going explorations into that uncharted region we call The Cinema of Weirdness—

There’s plenty of ground to cover—your eyes and opinions would be useful!

On the drawing board are: Otto Preminger’s underrated proto-magical realism about feminist empowerment (Such Good Friends; 1971); Robert Ryan in the ultimate Man Against Nature Fight For Survival—originally in 3-D (Inferno; 1953); and “What If Jaws Was Directed By Alfred Hitchcock?”

(part of the “Best Hitchcock Movies (That Hitchcock Never Made)” blogathon run by the wonderful sites Classic Becky’s Brain Food and Tales of the Easily Distracted).

Don’t get left behind! Stay tuned!

LERNER INTERNATIONAL is a GO!

Okay, are you guys ready?