#Filmistines Live Tweet Saturday, July 16, 2016 - Lemonade Joe

Filmistine

  Noun

1.          Ironic portmanteau of “film” and “Philistine” describing a member of a motley crew of people arguing, riffing, laughing and indoctrinating each other with their diverse tastes in movies. Devolves into bitter love/hate disputes when the subjects of Blade Runner and 1950s Danish cinema come up, yet somehow it perseveres.

     And so, apparently, we come to the birth of a new tag, the #Filmistines, a grassroots movie live tweet appreciation gathering running around 11PM EST on Saturday nights as a sort of prelude to the TCM Underground. I’ve gone with the flow of a number of back room VHS viewings, chat room movie nights, and live tweets in the last twenty plus years, and I had the honor of coming up with a name for the group that everyone seemed to like (it’s always nice to know that my complete lack of talent can fall back on making one new word out of two different words… I should put in an application to The Pokemon Company). Over the past month or so, the #Filmistines have waded into shallow waters with movies like Blade Runner, The ‘Burbs, the French New Wave classic Bob Le Flambeur, and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Some of us love them, some of us hate them, we kid around, we riff, we bum each other out when we don’t all fall under the same opinion of a classic, but we keep at it because that’s what movie lovers do. And we are making every attempt to dive deeper. It’s not an original concept, but if you can find someone with whom you can laugh and argue at the same time and keep coming back every week, I think that’s coming pretty close to what you’d call friendship. But I’m not here to give a motivational speech about getting along. I’m here to talk about me.

     Coming hot on the heels of my #MondayActionMovie and #CinemOn The Road takeover night on July 18 (see previous blog post for full details), I’ve called dibs on the #Filmistines Saturday night of July 16 to feature something special to me. I became a fan of Czechoslovakian film—and foreign film in general—as a very young child through, believe it or not, preschool animation. I had the distinct pleasure of the fledgling Nickelodeon channel and premium cable in the early 1980s, and early cable needed filler. Channels like HBO and shows like Nickelodeon’s Pinwheel had the opportunity to pad out their time with cartoons from all over the world including Russia, Sweden, Hungary, Australia, and Finland. That diversity, coupled with horror host broadcasts of Kung Fu and Japanese monster movies, would foster an admiration and appreciation for the diverse cultural styles of film that remains with me today. It was through those local network horror hosts that I would be introduced to the legend and the master that was Karel Zeman, a man some call both the Czechozlovakian Ray Harryhausen and Walt Disney. His animation style was a major influence of Monty Python's Terry Gilliam, but his work still doesn't seem to get the exposure and appreciation it deserves around the world. I would not have seen any of his work at all if not for some dubbed VHS releases of 1961's Baron Munchhausen and Saturday afternoon TV broadcasts of the dinosaur epic Journey to the Beginning of Time. If I thought I could wrangle enough people in the #Filmistines to buy some imported BluRays of those films from Zeman's own museum website (which I haven't dared to purchase myself yet for lack of money and fear that the BR player I have just might be one of the models that won't play the questionably region-coded discs), I'd go for it in a heartbeat, but for now, I'm testing the waters of Czech film appreciation with a more accessible title that did get a domestic US DVD release, 1964's Lemonade Joe.

     

     By 1964, that aforementioned cultural diversity had made its way around the world several times over already, been driven out of some countries by war and social upheaval and managed to make its way back again. In the West, the American Western genre specifically was suffering, but it was gaining ground in Europe and even Japan with Akira Kurosawa’s Western-influenced samurai films and the success of Italian “Spaghetti” Westerns from directors such as Sergio Leone. The formula stayed mostly consistent, but with every border crossing into a different culture, even the most well known archetypes and tropes take on new interpretations and controversies. Things took an interesting turn in Czechoslovakia, where the American Western had been a popular genre among the Czechoslovakian people as early as 1918 until American Westerns were banned under both Nazi and Stalinist rule for nearly twenty years. Although Westerns would not begin to reappear in the country until the 1960s, just in time for that new life Kurosawa and Leone breathed into the genre themselves, the influence of the American Western survived through the work of satirist Jiří Brdečka in the 1940s with Lemonade Joe. Lemonade Joe grew out from serials to radio to the stage and, eventually, to film in the 1964 musical comedy Limonádový Joe aneb Koňská opera, poking fun at the concepts of the American Western, commercialism, and aspects of top governing powers of the time, both Capitalism and Communism alike.

 

Recommended reading: International Westerns: Re-Locating the American Frontier

     July 16, 2016, at 11PM EST, join me as I subject the #Filmistines to Lemonade Joe. Falling a bit short of its 50^th anniversary but just in time for the 10^th anniversary of its DVD release to English audiences in 2006, Lemonade Joe can be found on Amazon Prime if a physical copy of the original DVD eludes you before show time. I’m delighted at the opportunity to revisit it and give it a little more exposure. A little song, a little dance, a little lemonade down your pants.