Hello!

Yep, it’s Spring, and the sap is running. The little birds outside my window seem to have one thing on their chirpy little minds, at least judging by the racket they’re making trying to out-sing the other guy competing for an amorous conquest. It’s warm enough to open the window for an hour or two each afternoon. I hope I get a bunch more ‘it’s Spring!’ sensations in the future . . . I’ve been so fortunate.

A couple of shout-out plugs for OPG’s today — Other People’s Blogs. I haven’t yet figured out a way to get a list of ‘favored pages’ on CineSavant, so I frequently tout some great, favorite destinations like John McElwee’s Greenbriar Picture Shows and David Cairns’ Shadowplay.

This time out a writer by the name of David Lawrence got my attention by linking to my page. Lawrence’s informative site is called Crime Film Hub, where he neatly summarizes disc news, and other reviewers & critics in reference to Crime-related pix. He wrote the following much-appreciated paragraph:

My defense is that this isn’t hollow praise — he’s giving reasons why somebody might not regret clicking their way to the CineSavant doorstep. As for ‘working in the film industry for many years’ . . . that feels like quite an exaggeration. And nah, I’m a relative latecomer in writing about physical media.

Maybe it’s Springtime that has me doing all this backhanded crowing about CineSavant I finally discovered this second site a year or so ago. It’s a real resource, like I want CineSavant to be. A correspondent told me that its writer, Janne Wass had information on obscure sci-fi pix that even I hadn’t read.

I’m not too crazy about most online sci-fi movie pages but this one is an exception: scifist 2.0. Janne Wass describes himself as a Finnish journalist and culture geek, but I’m very impressed with the depth and breadth of his articles on the 1,001 sci-fi pictures that also shape my worldview. What sets him aside is his special knowledge of really arcane sci-fi cinema, especially silent cinema and Eastern European pictures.

Wass keeps coming up with fascinating documentation on titles I’ve never heard of — he reads some Russian, which may explain why he can offer facts not accessible to us here in the States. He has a full article on a movie I’ve been whining about forever because of the lack of English-language information online, the Stalin-era Russian ‘satire’ Serebristaya Pyl (the poster just above, I think). Wass’s page (or long article) on Corman’s Beast with a Million Eyes is far better informed than my own review. In other words, I can’t start reading from his site too late in the evening, because I won’t get enough sleep.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson