Our Unpopular Populist

As I said in my last post, I go to a movie class every Thursday night. Everybody
seems to focus on one particular aspect of the films. My aspect is the characters. You can have a crappy film with a crappy story and a crappy budget. But if it has good characters, I don't care.

Any film with Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Charles Lawton or Christopher Plummer... If it has any of those guys I don't care about anything else. The same goes for books and videogames -- as long as they have good characters, I don't care about the pacing of the book or the gameplay in the videogame.

That's why I'm really into history. I love studying the characters of history. I don't care about empires that rose and fell. I just care about the characters.

And that's why, with given everything I've read about history, my favorite character has been Andrew Jackson. Born into extreme poverty, his father dead before he was born, mother and two brothers dead before he was 14. A child soldier in his early teens. Captured, he refused the humiliation of cleaning a British officer's boot. Accounts vary -- he was punished for that refusal either by getting his face cut or his hand sliced to the bone. Eventually, he was worth over $100 million (in today's dollars) -- of course, he married some of that. He shot those who insulted him or his family. He enjoyed violence so much that his last words were expressions of regret that he didn't kill Henry Clay and John Calhoun.

Some men in history had a knack for cheating death. Rasputin was a good example. Andrew Jackson was in several duels. He would challenge an opponent to a duel if he insulted his wife. He would let his opponent shoot first. He would be hit, and then fire back and kill his enemy. He had several bullets stuck in him his whole life. It was rumored that you could hear the bullets rattling around in his chest.

This is just a part of why I find him so compelling.

Movie Class

Back in 2010, I started taking a cinematic history course at Nassau Community College with a guy named Keith teaching the course. He had several courses -- horror, Spaghetti Westerns, comedy. My favorite was the horror class; I took it several times.

Somewhere along the road Keith got the idea to have an invitation-only class at his house, which would be more advanced and in-depth. It started in 2013, and has been the longest-running class I've ever been in.

I remember the first week, Keith showed us Tod Browning's 1932 classic, Freaks. The second week was King Dinosaur. But after that, I don't remember the exact order of the films he showed after that. For the first two years everything was 16-millimeter, but then we changed to DVDs. The class has been more exciting ever since.

Each session lasts a month -- four classes in a session, one class a week, with each session having a different theme. Some I like better than others. It seems like half of the sessions in a given year are set in stone -- meaning there are certain themes we hit each year. There's Hammer month, Giallo month, Poe month. Spaghetti Western month. and Bring Your Own Movie month (in which each student brings his own movie to show and discuss). For other sessions, Keith improvises, picking themes that he may not get back to. This year, for the first time there will be a crimmi month. And when Christopher Lee died we had a tribute month for him.

Some of my favorite films that he's shown have been:

• Island of Lost Souls
• The Most Dangerous Game
• The Flesh and the Fiends
• Don't Torture a Duckling
• Vincent Price's Masque of the Red Death
• The Witchfinder General
• The Mercenary
• Vincent Price's Fall of the House of Usher
• King Kong

Of course, anything from Hammer Films is a favorite, too.

There are also some movies that I simply would never have seen anywhere else, such as The Beast of Budapest.

For this year, I'm looking forward to seeing a month of crimmis, and whatever surprises Keith has in store.