Feral Cinema in The Onion A/V Section:
www.avclub.com/austin/articles/small-scope-big-screens-austins-repertory-film-sce,37203/
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FEATURING THE ABSOLUTE BEST OF FRINGE, CULT & OUTSIDER FILM, THE THIRD THURSDAY OF EVERY MONTH!! THURSDAY, JANUARY 21, 2010, 8 p.m. – $5 WHO IS KK DOWNEY? (Darren Curtis/Pat Keily, 2008) Kidnapper Films‘ Who Is KK Downey?, which screened twice at the 2008 Austin Film Festival, is the the most insanely spot-on satire of indie hipsters, gadfly novelists, alt-weekly music critics, and that reliably evil bitch goddess Fame since forever. It is the comedy shit and that is no lie, unlike J.T. Leroy, who was a total fabrication and still managed to sell about a gazillion books and scam the unscamable Asia Argento. Loosely based on the Leroy business (not to mention James Frey’s Million Little Pieces kerfluffle), KK Downey plays out like some deranged Kids in the Hall skit if the Kids in the Hall were actually the Kids at the Beauty Bar doing clandestine rails in the bathroom stall. But, you know, in a good way. Writers Darren Curtis, Pat Kiely, and Matt Silver play a failed rocker, a failed writer, and a failed altweekly music critic with a Bona Drag/Kill Uncle-era Morrissey coif, respectively, and all three inhabit their roles with such a degree of manic, leering, unhinged schadenfreude that hyperbolic praise is rendered moot. You’ve got to see it to believe it and when you do, you won’t believe what you saw, but trust me, oh yes they did. – Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle Feral Sounds From DJ GOMI (gomikitti.blogspot.com) TORTURED BY JOY (Henry Griffin, 2009)
(This) short film from the December/January issue of The Believer, “Tortured By Joy” is 11 minutes of pure enjoyment. Directed by Henry Griffin and described as “redefining ’straight-edge hardcore,” the 11-minutes come mostly in still photos with a flat voiceover. It’s smart, it’s hilarious, and it’s about punk, so how can you go wrong? Much like the editor in The Believer, I don’t really feel like I can talk about this one without giving away things I’d want to see. Just trust me and take a chance on this one. – Justin Cober-Lake, Alternate Tuning WHERE: United States Art Authority, 2906 Fruth Street (Right next to Spider House), Austin TX All Feral Cinema screenings will be shown at the United States Art Authority (a part of the Spider House/I Luv Video compound on 2908 Fruth Street) & will be projected on the large screen using our state-of-the-art projector & exemplary new sound system. Doors will open at 8 p.m. so you can get your drink on & the actual films will be shown at 8:30 p.m., with an intermission for giveaways, more drinking, bathroom breaks & some expert-only trivia contests. Feral Cinema screenings cost $5. These are going to be very cool events & hopefully they’ll become an integral part of Austin’s amazing film CULTure. Prizes! Giveaways! Snotty Movie Trivia! Cheap Drinks!
A review of Scott Conn’s DIRT ROAD TO PSYCHEDELIA “Peyote was legal in those days. They thought it was an ornamental shrub.” Ah, the hippie heydays of yore, when the music was better, the love was free, the streets were paved with acid, and cops handed out morning glories instead of citations. It was a different time, you understand. Seems like back then Timothy Leary was the dean, Willie Nelson the mayor, and Abbie Hoffman the chief of police. For those Austinites too young to be flower children, the next best thing is local filmmaker Scott Conn’s new documentary Dirt Road to Psychedelia: Austin, Texas During the 1960s. With a wealth of vintage Super-8 footage, musician interviews, early recordings, recently-unearthed photos, and stories of revelry and rebellion told by those who lived it, it’s enough to bring a tear to your pot-smoking granddad’s crimson eye. Ten years in the making, the research paid off. Conn has sussed out a number of players and artifacts of the period in this city’s heritage when the flames of cultural revolution were fanned by the political undesirables and fringe elements of society unafraid to experiment with new approaches, states of consciousness and technological innovation, and musical evolution was forged in the hotbeds of honky-tonk dive bars and smoke-stained juke joints. Places like Threadgill’s and, more famously, The Vulcan Gas Company, which opened its doors on Congress Ave. in the summer of 1970. Run by a loose collective of artists as a virtual commune for nonconformists and kindred spirits, it hosted some of the best troubadours of the day, be they folk, blues, or that new bastard offspring of the latter, rock ‘n’ roll. Canned Heat, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, The Fugs, The Velvet Underground, and Muddy Waters all passed across its legendary stage, not to mention Austin’s own seminal psych-rock pioneers, The 13th Floor Elevators. The film muses in depth on their widely influential sound, which through singer/songwriter Roky Erickson’s electric guitar and Tommy Hall’s electric jug helped define the psychedelic movement. Aside from introducing a younger generation to the aural pleasures to be derived from local bands like Shiva’s Headband, the Conqueroo, and the Hub City Movers, Dirt Road also explores, through the anecdotes of the scene’s surviving minstrels and hangers-on, the rise to prominence of Janice Joplin, who lived and gigged regularly in Austin. At the time, rock ‘n’ roll had yet to be recognized as the midwife of radical change that it would soon embody a couple years later, and was instead considered a rival form to be looked down upon as vapid and pandering by many of the folkies, who identified the Beats as their spiritual precursors and aspired to similar intellectual and artistic heights. Joplin’s progression to mainstream crossover success, therefore, helped provide a bridge between the acoustic and electric sets, and hearing first hand accounts of her origins is fascinating to any student of music history.
The psychedelic aesthetic that was born in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests of the 60s is also nicely examined. We learn about the print process and inspirations behind those kaleidoscopic posters and handbills proliferated by the Vulcan and sister sources in San Francisco, which will forever be associated in people’s minds with the era (and are now highly coveted by collectors). The film even features a mini-tutorial on the art of live liquid light manipulation that results in all those phantasmagoric rear projections of pulsing alien hearts and polymorphous pseudopods which were once ubiquitous but have fallen into neglect as of late, and instantly conjure up sublime go-go’s gyrating to a jangly Fender Strat being tortured through a vacuum tube amp with ripped cones. Get a pair of clock faces, just add food coloring and baby oil, and then “Pretend it’s a girl you’re dancing with, and you got her by the hips,” and you too will be mesmerizing psych audiences with fantastic imagery to make ‘em feel they’ve just downed a cap or twelve of distilled psilocybin. Aside from the visual components, the film’s talking heads provide interesting commentary and reflections. The inevitable air of nostalgia that threads through their accounts for their time and place as they wax philosophic about the factors that contributed to their generation’s zeitgeist is tempered by a palpable and prevailing feeling of melancholy in light of the current state of world affairs. After all, the 60s were a time of action coupled with a let’s-all-join-hands-and-levitate-the-Pentagon naiveté where anything was possible through Love, and where has it landed us? At one point, a woman laments the fact that she sees absolutely no trace in contemporary society that the 60s ever took place at all. So what happened? In the delicate assessment of one sagely veteran in the film, “We got our fucking asses handed to us.” It could be argued that the 60s counterculture failed to achieve many of their goals, but at least in their haze of cannabis smoke and mescaline vision quests, when they were seeing Aztec temples and transcending the temporal sphere, Austin’s musical forerunners weren’t too blazed to remember to hit the “record” button, and for that, we can be ever grateful that, at the very least, the music has survived. For its microcosmic visual counterpart, that same gratitude can now be extended to Mr. Scott Conn. -Andy Gately Reprinted from Live Music Capitol
While She Was Out (Dir. Susan Montford, 2008) In a Sentence: Rick Moody Meets Angela Carter… The most revealing thing about this indie sleeper is that it’s produced by Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Devil’s Backbone), and he must have recognized the grim, archetypal fairytale at the heart of this plot-challenged film. And he was right. Though the plot is the burned-out wreckage of a hundred less arty films, there’s style to spare here & a few scenes that will take your fucking breath away. Kim Basinger, an actress I’ve NEVER liked, plays Della, the abused suburban wife of this year’s villain du jour, a greedy drunken stock broker/banker/thief (a neither here-nor-there Craig Sheffer). He comes home, drinks himself into a bloody stupor & threatens violence — though the film oddly stops short of his domestic brutality, in favor of his general economic ickiness — while Della appeases, appeases & then goes out to buy wrapping paper at the local mall. Because it’s Christmas & she’s protectorate mother in excelsis. There’s an amazing scene at the beginning of the film, after Sheffer punches the requisite hole in the living room wall because Basinger can’t keep the house clean, where she goes up to her children’s room & all is paradise. The children don’t even seem troubled when she’s around. Della has, miraculously, protected them from almost everything. They’re still excited by Christmas after nearly bearing witness to their mother’s demise. At the mall, Della runs afoul of a bizarrely multi-ethnic group of tweener hoods. Seriously, there’s a black kid, an Asian kid, a Latino & Lukas Haas, their leader, who’s becoming so creepy as an adult that he should be zapped into the past to star in late-60s biker films. The rest of the movie is standard procedure. The twisted turks spend the rest of the movie hunting her down while she defends herself with whatever she can grab out of the bright red toolbox she manages to carry away from her wrecked SUV. And that’s not much of a film. It’s not much of anything. What sets this film apart is its amazing fairytale quality. The opening tracking shot through the dull, winter-wet suburban cul-de-sac where Della lives is the finest opening of a horror film since the Torrence family’s drive to the Overlook Hotel. It almost hurts how much the festooned Christmas lights can’t illuminate the darkness on the edge of the city, where the McMansions meet the primeval forest. Visually, the film never lets up from there. The mall in which Della buys her wrapping paper feels completely off, claustrophobic & empty all at once. It’s a creepy effect in a movie full of visual oddities. If you latch onto the plot, you’ll never get to this film’s soul. Once Della witnesses Haas & his Rainbow Coalition gun down a mall security guard, While She Was Out gets about as allegorically nutty as a Nicholas Roeg or Neil Jordan film, but it doesn’t throw its style at you as a substitute for lack of internal narrative logic. Instead the movie makes you come to it. If you don’t, you’d be excused, because there are scenes of groaning incongruity along the way & the Brothers Grimm elements do start to grate after a while, but when this movie truly fires up its gingerbread house oven, which it does quite a bit, you’re amazed at the crap you’ll put up with — the bright red toolbox, the dark forest of the subconscious at the edge of the encroaching suburbs, the absolute madness of Haas & Basinger’s bonding, etc. The four basic settings are so detailed & full of sinister nostalgia, without ever once resorting to special effects, that it’s hard not to feel drawn into each of them. We begin down the rain-slicked streets, Christmas lights straining to reflect on the pavement, proceed to the desolate but completely packed mall, stall where the ghost-ship skeletons of faux Tudor crapholes-to-be cast a thousand seasick waxing & waning shadows & then we’re into the woods, where Della finds her maternal wild side and, as an implausible but strangely inevitable boon, her sexual prowess. This is Guilllermo Del Toro territory through & through & he’s found an able compatriot in Montford, a first-time director with an absolutely original visual sensibility. While She Was Out is not about the actors & no matter what you hear, this won’t make you love Basinger if you’re not already a fan, but it’s an inventive, sometimes gruesome, suburban fairly tale, and it would make a fascinating double feature with Matthew Bright’s superior Freeway or Neil Jordan’s inferior Company of Wolves.
The Children (Dir. Tom Shankland, 2008) Any true horror fan knows a real live creepy cherub is way scarier than some computer-generated spook & also that nothing in cinema is creepier than a European toddler, the British bad seed being damn-near a delicacy. You can have your Japanese zashiki-warashi. You can have your evil Patty McCormacks, Macaulay Culkins & Isabelle Fuhrmans. Pound for pound, the English & Continental tykes are the ne plus ultra of sinister nestlings. The alien telepaths from Village & Children of the Damned, those Diane Arbus twins from The Shining, the fed-up kids of Almanzora in Narciso Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), Harvey Stevens as the devil’s own in Richard Donner’s The Omen, the little hedonists pitted against Deborah Kerr’s impregnable corsets in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) & the lethal, pint-sized projections of Samantha Eggars’ unconscious mind in Cronenberg’s The Brood (Canadian, but what’s the difference, really?) — these children seem pulled directly from isolated private school detention rooms in the north of England, their rosy cheeks, forced manners & flyaway hair belying the evil brewing inside them. It’s probably America’s fear of exquisite manners that makes these children chilling to us. We assume any child who quietly reads a book in a straight-back chair & refers to its parents as “Mother” & “Father,” must have something to hide. If anyone’s going to manipulate our children into becoming homicidal drones, it’s going to be us, goddammit. Tom Shankland’s The Children is a remarkable addition to this horror sub-genre, an excruciatingly tense, beautifully-scaled & psychologically potent tale of innocence run — quite unexpectedly — amok. The film’s set-up is as English as it gets, a Harold Pinter play gone violently berserk. Two sisters, Elaine & Chloe, are united for Christmas at Chloe & her husband’s isolated Tudor mansion. Well, it’s not a mansion exactly, but the house serves to starkly underline the economic divide between the two siblings. While it’s obvious the sisters are close, cracks are beginning to show in their relationship. Elaine (Eva Birthistle) has obviously made some rotten decisions in her life & has been uprooted enough to be terminally nervous, in high contrast to Chloe’s (The L Word’s Rachel Shelley) controlled, measured life. The two communicate with the weird mix of eye-rolling, passive aggression & eternal patience that is the special province of sisters and, while it’s obvious they have a blood rapport, they are prone to whispering not-so-nice things under their breath. Most of these not-so-nice things involve Elaine’s new boyfriend, Jonah, who comes to the relationship with two children of his own & Chloe’s husband, Robbie, who all too obviously hounds after Elaine’s teenage goth daughter Casey. All kinds of ambitious notions about child rearing are bandied about as if the tots are prize calves or giant radishes destined for the state fair. They’re to be taught Chinese, home-schooled, weaned from this, that or the other…after all, at this age, they’re open to anything. But what the children are most “open” to is an ugly little parasite we see brewing only in a quick intercut of anonymous germs squiggling in viral bliss on a microscope slide. The moment Jonah’s kids arrive at the manor, the young boy begins to wretch violently & behave in a disoriented manner. As the children sip from each other’s cups of juice & cough in each other’s faces, we can almost feel this germ, or parasite, or whatever, spreading. Shankland is a top-notch director & the film is so visually astute & subtle that it’s hard to peg the exact moment you start feeling the mounting dread & exactly which visual cues are instigating the suspense. There’s a scene mid-way through the film where one child begins to cry & the bawling becomes contagious. We’ve all experienced this before, but soon the pitch of this tantrum rises into a cacophony of sound & editing that makes us question the validity of what we consider “normal” in children. There are so many moments in The Children that echo this, moments where these kids are apparently doing something very kid-like, but something is heightened, rendered sinister & it’s to Shankland’s credit that we, like the parents, can’t get a handle on it until it’s too late. And when it’s too late, it’s far too late. Jonah’s older daughter begins to see the changes first, though we only know this by the distressed look on her face as she sees the others make almost militaristic formations on the snowy plain in front of the manor house. As a witty accent to the idea of the children becoming somehow “militarized,” they are bivouacked in a bright yellow tent in the snow & this becomes their de facto war room as the action intensifies. The film is full of witty touches, but it’s the kind of wit horror films used to have in the late 60s/early 70s, when social criticism & sly satire was an integral — but subtextual – part of the whole ritual. These days, Tarantino-esque quips & cartoon pratfalls on slicks of blood pass for humor & drain the films of any real resonance. Shankland returns the mirroring element to horror, reminding us that what’s scary is not how far-removed the monster or ghost or psychopath is from our daily life, but how very ordinary the supernatural intrusion can seem, right up until the moment it tears a bloody chunk out of your cranium. Of course, once the children are fully in the grip of this mysterious virus, it’s blood on snow for a significant portion of the film & cinematographer Nanu Segal gives the whole bloodbath a chapped, raw palette, with splashes of yellow & pink keeping the killing fields from looking like one big raspberry snowcone. Seemingly possessing some sort of hive mind telepathy, the sick kids go through the unsuspecting, liberal adults with shocking dexterity. But it’s the violent effectiveness you’d expect from children reduced to animal instinct, facing off against parents who simply will not believe their little pride & joys are out to viciously murder them. When the adults finally decide to fight back (and there’s not much of a response force left by then), your eyes will be glued open for the duration of the movie. There’s still nothing more shocking than watching adults forced to brutally retaliate against rogue children, whether they’re possessed by alien forces or simply bad eggs. Just before death, there’s a moment when they return to being little angels & there’s nothing more terrifying than that. Very Highly Recommended.
Anvil! The Story of Anvil (Dir. Sacha Gervasi, 2008) By now most viewers of rock cinema know that this documentary is a real-life Spinal Tap, documenting the middling rise & long, sad career coma of Canadian metal doofs, Anvil. Just when Anvil’s about to call bullshit on this Sisyphean, 30-year project, they receive just enough hope or encouragement to delude themselves for another few years. By film’s end, when Anvil play before a giddy packed auditorium (at 11:30 in the morning) at some Japanese metalfest, it’s hard to know whether to hug those screaming metal kids or slap each & every one of them upside the head. In the early 80s two nice Jewish boys from Ontario, Robb Reiner (Yes, I know, the director of Spinal Tap with an extra ‘b’) & Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow met when Lips heard thunderous drums & a record by Cactus blasting from Reiner’s bedroom window. They fall in love — there’s simply nothing else to call their relationship — and start a band. In 1984, three albums (Hard’n'Heavy, Metal on Metal, Forged in Fire) later, Anvil was headlining the gigantic Super Rock Festival in Japan, with Bon Jovi, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, etc. Reiner was pioneering the now-ubiquitous double-bass drum technique & Lips took the stage in a bondage harness, playing his Flying V with a large dildo, to the delight of pre-pubescent boys on several continents. Eight albums later — including more masterstrokes of alliteration like Pound for Pound, Strength of Steel, Worth the Weight, Plenty of Power, etc. — Lips & Reiner are back in Ontario, barely making ends meet at a variety of menial jobs & playing shows at local beer holes where toothless Canucks drink beer through their noses & bang their heads to their hairy heroes. While Anvil! The Story of Anvil is front-loaded with testimony from the likes of Slash, Lars & Lemmy (if you need to know their last names, you should just stop reading now), all praising the originality of the band & shaking their heads over the unfairness of the fickle music industry (“Everybody ripped ‘em off & then just left ‘em for dead,” Says Slash), it would take a hessian more discerning than I to tell the difference between the thudding, idea-free riffery of Anvil & the failures-in-waiting that litter the open-stage nights of desperate bars throughout the middle west. Portrayed as Missing Links between something I strain to care about & something I don’t care about at all, Anvil may well be armor gods, but I couldn’t get Chuck Klosterman on the phone to ask. Lyrics like “Little peaches play/rubbing their beavs” & songs like “Thumb Hang” (Lips’ learned discourse on the Spanish Inquisition will make you wish you’d dropped out of school when you were 17 too) & “Toe Jam” (I’m not even sure it’s an intentional pun), don’t do much to keep the Spinal Tap comparisons at bay. That said, Lips’ centered optimism & gratitude concerning the contingencies of rock is truly inspiring for a guy who’s had his dreams urinated on as many times as he has. The entire mid-section of the documentary is devoted to an overseas tour booked by a fangirl Euro-Gorgon named Tiziana. The ambitions & lucrative promises of this outing would cause any reasonable people to make a few inquiries of their own, but Anvil whole-heartedly believes 1500 Euros per gig in 30 cities is just what they deserve. They put all their trust in the obviously naive & incompetent Tiziana and — city by city — the tour becomes a study in bad faith, bad directions & bad vibes. Having made little to no upward progress on the tour (though Anvil’s bass player does marry Tiziana for her efforts), the boys return to the snowy north and, of course, decide it’s time to put out their 13th album, prosaically titled This is 13. For most bands a tour this apocalyptic would lead to a complete overhaul of expectations & reassessment of priorities. And maybe, after a two-decade run of tepid luck, a band might be forgiven for not wanting to tempt the Hammer of the Gods by recording a THIRTEENTH record. But that’s not Anvil’s style. For them, disaster is another word for, well, something that isn’t disaster. Mustering monies for the new opus really pumps up the pathos in the film & provides perhaps its best scenes, those in which Lips is forced to do sunglasses tele-sales (“the kind Keanu Reaves wears”) and — to his credit really — can’t sell a single pair. In the meantime, Reiner — an Edward Hopper fan — shows off his painting of a turd floating in a toilet bowl. You can’t make this shit up & the scenes out-Spinal Tap Spinal Tap. Director Gervasi doesn’t miss an opportunity to visually or thematically reference the mockumentary classic. Hell, there’s even a scene at Stonehenge thrown in, mostly for giggles. In fact, the entire directorial style is pretty manipulative here, but if it weren’t, the film would just be sad, instead of that kind of sad that forms a lump in your throat which, quite surprisingly, emerges as a cheer. Gervasi creates a dramatic beginning, middle & end to a story which, in reality, shrugs along rather passively. Wouldn’t most people rather see Grandpa’s measure of the fish that got away, his arms outstretched as far as they will go, than see the actual fish he caught or know whether it even existed at all?
It’s Alive (Josef Rusnak, 2008) It’s always a pleasant surprise when the remake of a cult classic doesn’t make you want to hole up in a dark room watching old creaky VHS tapes for the rest of your natural days & it doesn’t happen very goddamn often. The last time I recall warming, even a little, to the “re-imagining” of a revered touchstone was Douglas Buck’s daunting stab at Brian De Palma’s Sisters in 2006. Buck didn’t hyperventilate stylistically to compensate for not having De Palma’s unique gifts & he didn’t try to make Sisters “relevant” to a new generation of ghouls by littering the set with severed state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs & the soundtrack with Type O Negative or Marilyn Manson. It was a very mature retooling, with just enough formal aplomb to point fondly to the original without mindlessly aping it & enough new wrinkles to keep De Palma acolytes from being bored. The same goes for Josef Rusnak’s It’s Alive, a confidently-mounted pass at Larry Cohen’s 1974 trash classic about a mother who strives valiantly to protect her monster baby from the vile people who think monster babies don’t have the same rights as any other child. Apparently “No child left behind” meant nothing in the mid-70s. The original, starring Guy Stockwell, Michael Ansara & Hawaii 5-0 regular Sharon Farrell was an over-the-top cautionary tale of bad parenting, bad chemicals & bad genes. Like most benchmark horror films, It’s Alive confronted the salient concerns of its time — pollution, rogue youth, reproductive rights, flipper babies, etc. The original script title was even Baby Killer, a bleakly witty reference to the name allegedly shouted at returning Vietnam vets in the days following the My Lai Massacre. As with the films of his fellow exploitation maestro Jack Hill, it was often hard to tell when director/writer Cohen (Hell Up in Harlem, God Told Me To, Q: The Winged Serpent) was being intentionally funny & when he simply fell victim to no-budget shoddiness. Because of this uneasy mixture of comedy, wild gore & pointed satire, however, Cohen is now considered a pioneer of sorts & the off-kilter tonal shifts he all but perfected in his best movies are now commonplace in fringe cinema. Strangely, most of the taboos Cohen feverishly trounced upon in the original It’s Alive would still shock a good share of the population today. While gore is old hat now for most movie-goers, there’s still something pretty unsettling about gruesomely perverting the entire mother/child relationship. Thankfully, though, the escalation of gore is not what gives this remake its considerable impact. Not that blood & limbs don’t fly once feeding time rolls around for our monster baby. They do & Rusnak handles the violence rather, um, elegantly. There’s an icy even-handedness to the carnage & the vibrant, nearly hot pink, color of the blood has an industrial quality, as if the gore scenes were shot through a vellum filter. This approach to violence is in direct opposition to the ragged, kitchen blender mayhem of the original. The performances are considerably cooled off as well & having actors with some mid-range at their disposal instead of slumming soap opera actors who veer wildly between histrionics & catatonia, makes Rusnak more able to expertly smudge the lines between satire & serious horror. Bijou Phillips (Choke, What We Do Is Secret), as the child’s slowly unraveling mother, never overdoes it. We understand her motives instinctually, the same way she somehow comprehends the needs of her indiscriminately carnivorous infant. Raphael Coleman (Nanny McPhee), as the kid’s deeply suspicious young wheel chair-bound uncle, steals some memorable scenes as well. Most of the other actors have a B-movie sturdiness that will encourage you to rewind scenes when they mutter something particularly outrageous in their off-hand monotones. One would think that making Cohen’s original premise more cerebral might ruin the effect, but, on the contrary, it makes the viewer even more disoriented, less sure whether to laugh or wince in horror. The story still retains its absurdity of course: One minute there are grown, strapping men & women standing or sitting in close proximity to a gurgling infant, then the music becomes ominous, there’s some animalistic shrieking & after some quick, confusing edits the entire room or car interior is painted in blood & giblets. The logistics of this don’t need to be explained. That would take all the fun out of it. Appropriately, it’s becoming a great month for horror on DVD, what with the release of The Children, The Killing Room, Trick ‘r Treat & Shortcut. Here’s another tightly-wound, fierce little gem to add to the list.
La Jetee/Sans Soleil (Dir. Chris Marker, 1962/1983) Told in a series of still photographs that, through dissolves, the pace of editing & artful sound design, achieve a kind of meta-motion, La Jetee is one of French filmmaker Marker’s few forays into narrative film. Mostly known as an experimental documentary director (although Terry Gilliam’s “remake” of La Jetee, 12 Monkeys, has given it a popular boost in the Marker oeuvre), Marker’s film seems to be science fiction, but most of the images are from post-war France, or somehow bring to mind concentration camps, occupation, and resistance. It’s a love story not unlike the one in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, with odd time travel elements, and a melancholy, pervasive sense of doom throughout. The Criterion set also includes Sans Soleil, a meditation on the failures & successes of a particularly French brand of radical politics (notably May ’68, the general strike that brought about the downfall of the De Gaulle government), and a film more indicative of the full body of the filmmaker’s work. A female narrator reads from the letters of globe-trotting cameraman Sandor Krasna while Marker shows us images of such exotic locales as Japan, Iceland & Africa. The sections on Japan appear strikingly prescient for 1983, all but predicting the rise of digital culture. While all of these elements may sound wildly disparate, the whole is transfixing & quite effective. Highly recommended.
The Nightcomers (Dir. Michael Winner, 1972) A kind of prequel to Henry James’ haunting Turn of the Screw, this unnecessary & quite daft muddle trades murk for atmosphere, fetishism for sensuality, and mush-mouthed anachronisms for the subtle gothic underpinnings of the original. Brando, as the brutish Quint, climbs trees, explodes frogs, and speaks in the kind of Irish brogue mustered by pub-crawling Minnesotans on St. Patrick’s Day. One must remember this is the phase of Brando’s demented career that also spawned his calico bonnet-wearing bounty hunter in Arthur Penn’s Missouri Breaks, the completely enigmatic blond kidnapper in Night of the Following Day, the bearded cosmic guru who lives in the back of a semi-truck in Candy, and the cotton-jowled Mafia don in Coppola’s The Godfather (a performance no less crazed for being universally lauded). There’s some nudity, but it’s mostly Brando, who taunts matronly Thora Hird with the threat of his nakedness. It’s hard to remember what her response is, but ours is a resounding, “Yuck, God almighty, no. Really. Please, no.” The two child actors, lonely over-educated delinquents with ghosts for friends, must be first-rate to make their performances work (see Jack Clayton’s marvelous 1961 adaptation, The Innocents), but these two moppets, Verna Harvey & Christopher Ellis are militant non-actors, which is to say, they cannot, for the bloody lives of them, act at all. If you’re a fan of watching Brando go slowly insane, which I am, there’s much to snigger over while watching The Nightcomers. If you’re after anything, and I do mean ANYTHING else, keep moving…
Panic in Needle Park (Dir. Jerry Schatzberg, 1971) Upper West Side junkies on the go, Kitty Winn & Al Pacino, find grim solace in horse and one another. Winn, emotionally wounded after an illegal abortion demanded by her unfaithful boyfriend Raul Julia, meets up with crafty hood Pacino & they fall in love, sort of. Written by Joan Didion & John Gregory Dunne, Panic in Needle Park is a haunting study of need & emotional depravation, but it doesn’t go down easy. The narrative is an unrelenting downward spiral & some of the shots of NYC’s “Needle Park” have a documentary candor that will surely make you flinch once or twice. While it’s no secret that Pacino is an actor’s actor, it’s Winn (Exorcist, Exorcist II: The Heretic, Peeper) who steals the show here.
Pick-up/The Teacher (Dir. Bennie Hirschenson, 1975/Howard Avedis, 1974) While The Teacher is a slightly above-average high school wish-fulfillment sexploitation film made somewhat watchable by the presence of a voyeuristic psycho played by the great Anthony James (…tick…tick…tick, Vanishing Point, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven), the real find in this Grindhouse Double Feature is Pick-Up. Two girls — one a happy-go-lucky freak shamelessly letting her freak flag fly, the other a very strange occultist who spends most of the film having acid-soaked visions based on her Tarot readings & surreal memories of being molested by her priest as a child – hitch a ride with a pretty likable hippie (who looks a lot like a blond Gram Parsons, wearing a weird kind of Nudie Union Suit) named Chuck. Chuck is driving a large, pretty awesome mobile home across Florida for a crusty, cigar-chomping salesman who keeps yelling at him over a wall-mounted telephone behind the driver’s seat. When a hurricane strikes, the mobile home is stuck in the swamp & Chuck & the happy hippie girl frolic naked in the bayou for what seems like hours. Meanwhile the dark, brooding Manson girl is visited by straw-hat wearing senatorial candidate who wants to tell her whatever she wants to hear, a mystical black goddess in a flowing cape, and the creepiest clown EVER committed to celluloid. She writhes naked on a big white altar in the middle of the swamp, has visions of playing a church organ & spouts cryptic nonsense in voice-over. When it’s her turn to bed Chuck, they do it on the altar while the other girl is raped & killed by the toothless rednecks not chosen for John Boorman’s Deliverance. The music is a crazed mix of synthesizer skree, wild guitar psychedelia & pretty spooky freak folk. A dated curio for sure, but WHAT a curio. Highly recommended.
Trog (Dir. Freddie Francis, 1970) Aging anthropologist (!?!) Joan Crawford, armed with her “hypo-gun,” engages in a battle of the wills with a prehistoric troglodyte (A “trog,” for those of us in the know), while wearing a series of quite comely multi-colored lab smocks. Now, Joan Crawford knows a little something about battles of the will. She faced off against Coca-Cola, Louis B. Mayer, Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? & even an axe-wielding version of herself in Strait Jacket! So, why not a shambling Neanderthal? Until you’ve Joan play Annie Sullivan to Trog’s hairy Helen Keller, you just haven’t lived. Rush down to ILV & rent this immediately or my respect for you will diminish greatly. I see you there, standing at the New Release shelves, wondering if you’ll ever get to see Stephen Frears’ The Queen, Almodovar’s Volver, or that Reno 911 movie, but I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts Trog is in, just sulking there amidst the Just In section, eagerly awaiting your hungry eyes!
Vigilante (Dir. William Lustig, 1983) Lustig produced more exploitation films than anyone other than Roger Corman & David F. Friedman & directed The Violation of Claudia (1977) & the Maniac Cop series. Here he helms a Death Wish-style revenge flick that benefits greatly from the combined exploitation chops of Robert Forster (Jackie Brown, Medium Cool), Fred Williamson (M*A*S*H, Three the Hard Way, Hell Up in Harlem), Joe Spinell (Rancho Deluxe, Taxi Driver, Winter Kills), and Woody Strode (The Gatling Gun, Kingdom of the Spiders, Che!). Forster’s wife & child are killed by a very strangely dressed gang of street thugs (like those weird, pretty harmless bubblegum motorcycle gangs Jackie Chan always fights, only deadly serious) in one of the most brutal onscreen child murders since Assault on Precinct 13. The whole movie revels in over-the-top violence but also takes thoughtful, unexpected plot turns into grey areas of vigilantism, and contains some pretty smart scenes for this genre. Recommended for the cast & some great moral curveballs.
Who Can Kill a Child? (Dir. Narciso Ibanez Serrador, 1976) A great, nearly forgotten, entry into the Creepy Brood of Killer Children genre (The Brood, Devil Times Five, Village of the Damned, etc.), Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child? is a methodically-paced stunner shot on an island off the coast of Spain. In it, a reasonably happy married couple, expecting their first child, vacation to an island the husband visited years before. There’s nothing at all remarkable about this couple except that they’re about to have a baby. The island seems to be deserted, but soon it becomes apparent that the children have murdered off most of the adults after realizing that looking darling will often keep them from being mowed down like the evil urchins they really are. Opportunistic bastards! The scene in which the husband is finally forced to shoot a child is as shocking & yet beautifully-filmed as any in the history of cinema. Very little motivation is given for the children’s behavior, unless you count the first ten minutes of the film, in which we are deluged with documentary footage of children abused in Nazi concentration camps, Biafra & Vietnam. A very spooky, stylistically unique horror film. Highly recommended.
ALLISON ANDERS Anders began her filmmaking career as a Production Assistant on Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, and has since helmed such deeply personal, ambling, iconoclastic films as Border Radio (mandatory viewing for LA punk aficionados), Gas Food Lodging (mandatory viewing for anyone interested in the roots of independent cinema), Mi Vida Loca (mandatory viewing, period) & Grace of My Heart (ditto). She is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s coveted “genius grant”, has won & been nominated for numerous Independent Spirit Awards, founded & programs films for the Don’t Knock the Rock Film & Music Festival, is Professor of Film & Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara & has directed several episodes of HBO’s Sex and the City & Showtime’s The L Word. As befits her Kentucky upbringing, Anders is also a brilliant, accessible conversationalist & vivid storyteller… FIVE NOT SO EASY PIECES: 1. A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964) I have seen this movie at least several hundred times and I expect to see it freshly each time for the rest of my life. It thrills me to no end, and if I don’t scream outloud each time I see it, I am screaming inside over each glorious close-up of Paul McCartney and the collective positive pop culture energy that was Beatlemania. It is a supremely perfect movie, it never rings false, true to itself in every single frame and it never once drags or feels the least implausible– even though– it is. It gives a little taste of what a drag fame would be, and yet it quickly veers away from getting too droll and miserable about it. I will no doubt watch this film within days of the moment I leave this mortal coil. 2. Alice In The Cities (Wim Wenders, 1974) A beautiful postcard of the early 70s…and you will never be able to hear this Ozu inspired Can score anywhere else except by watching Wenders glorious movie. 3. Harold And Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971) To view it as just a geriatric cougar and young Bud Cort is to miss the true gift of this movie — which is a lesson in connections between people, yes, but also connections to the earth, music, humor, life. It is the most affirming film ever made. And if you were on a desert island, you would need this! I certainly would. 4. A Stolen Life (Curtis Bernhardt, 1946) This film lives inside my cells, it informed my ideas about romantic love from age 5 when I first saw it. Bette Davis in this movie as twins Kate and Pat is both of the women I found wrestling inside of myself when I was younger. And now that they are both at peace somewhere within me, I love the film more each time I see it. 5. Two Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971) If I ever got lonely on a desert island, and needed company — let it be Dennis Wilson and James Taylor in this movie: they wouldn’t talk much, would understand isolation, and would be very easy on my eyes! Rough and Ragged Sixth: 6. The Man From Laramie (Anthony Mann, 1955) I think if I were surrounded by water, I would really miss the rocky treacherous New Mexico landscape of Anthony Mann’s westerns. This movie would be my perfect fix.
MAX DROPOUT Whip-smart Max Dropout, named, I presume, after his great grandfather Phineas Dropout, has, for years, been the first line of defense against squares & frat boys at Austin’s beloved garage rock headquarters, Beerland. His finely-honed bullshit detector is somewhat mitigated by the glint of joviality in his eyes & once you’ve shown yourself to be someone who can be trusted after six to ten tall boys & three or four shots of Jim Beam, you’ll always be family as far as he’s concerned… This is a strange list, because I actually have films on here that do not appear in my top ten of all-time. If I were stuck on a desert island, I think I’d have to select films that have survived repeated viewings without much wear on their entertainment value. Several of these films continue to reward me by giving up new details I hadn’t noticed from previous viewings. Here are my top five in no particular order: A Face In The Crowd (Elia Kazan, 1957) More of a murky gray than pitch black, my impressions of these characters has changed drastically as I’ve gotten older. With age, our perception of integrity, morality, and sexuality definitely matures, and this is one of those films that will continually yield fresh insight into human nature with each subsequent viewing. This film is steeped in punk rock ethos despite predating the movement. A very dark comedy featuring some of the finest performances I’ve ever seen on screen, while the photography manages to feel somewhat contemporary. There are a lot of odd shot selections that seem to spite the fact that it’s a black and white film. Death Wish 3 (Michael Winner, 1985) Bronson always manages to play a protagonist who’s a convincing badass despite yielding numerous unintentionally hilarious moments. This, of course, is the granddaddy of them all. Michael Winner manages to multiply the comic book factor evolves over the course the first sequel, and overdose the thing with a violence so over the top that it verges on stooge-ish at times. This film is ALWAYS a blast of fun to the face. A Rockwellian supernatural thriller, this is a beautiful and eerie film with a level of atmosphere than very few films ever manage to evoke. Despite a few unfortunate spots in the score, this is nearly flawless. Great cast, great script, unabashedly nostalgic, and stands up to repeat viewings. The Seven Faces of Doctor Lao (George Pal, 1964) Tony Randall turns in an amazing performance, as he manages to play seven roles throughout this story of a traveling carnival that enters a town on the verge of gentrification. Essentially, this is a tale about the death of the American spirit of independence, and it perhaps even moreso relevant today than it was during its initial release. Quite possibly the best film George Pal ever made; it is at the very least his most intellectual. Sardonic hate mail to his critics who had labeled him a horror director, Polanski still manages to pay homage to the British horror genre with this delightful comedy. Roman himself demonstrates his worth as a physical comedian with a knockout performance as Alfred. As morbid as it may sound, Sharon Tate’s scenes in this film would wind up as the inevitable jerkoff material on the island
HARVEY SMITH Smith’s highly personal, cerebral, politically astute approach to video games has turned him into a bit of a guru in both the gaming & computer media community at large & he’s won numerous awards for his work on such acclaimed, immersive role-playing games as Wing Commander, Deus Ex, Ultima & System Shock. Smith has also lectured extensively around the world on emergent media & the role of computer & video games in modern culture… Question: Why are we so obsessed with deserted islands? Answer: If I could take 5 movies with me (and none of them could be porn), I’d 1) Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998) I love this movie because it evokes some of the same 2) Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) I love the nihilistic ethos of this film. And I 3) The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) There’s something about small, dying towns 4) Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) It’s probably a cliché for someone of my generation 5) Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) I’ll admit that I don’t normally like movies made I love Kubrick, and The Shining might have made the list except that The late researcher and radio show host is considered by many to be the queen of conspiriology, with theories on nearly every facet of societal ills. Tim Canale’s debut film, which is mostly comprised of Brussell’s 1987 lecture at UC Santa Cruz, is a rare opportunity to see Lady Mae herself going on one of her patented esoteric rants against all the nefarious government plots that are heralding our imminent descent into a tyrannical post-capitalistic police state. Throughout the course of her speech, the former housewife and needlepoint enthusiast stitches together so many disparate elements and rogue agencies into one overarching cloak-and-dagger meta-narrative, it’s a challenge sometimes just to keep pace with her. In Brussell’s worldview, it’s not unlikely to hear Hoover, Hitler, Hoffa, and Hughes, all in the same breath. And while her research is highly meticulous and annotated, its delivery is so rapid-fire, and the implications of each sentence so far-reaching, that watching it in one sitting is downright exhausting. Whether or not you agree with any or all of her theories, or if you’ve even heard of her, you can still enjoy this film. It does, however, help to be fluent in the tongue of the paranoid, the language of the conspiracy buff. Conspirinoia, call it. Unless you can navigate through a conversation on the New World Order, the Warren Commission, the Illuminati and MK Ultra, you may find yourself staring at Ms. Brussell like a dog that’s just been shown a card trick. For novices, I’d recommend reading a transcription of one of her broadcasts first, so that when your mind begins reeling, and it will, you can let it all marinate a bit before returning to the fray. Her basic argument, though, goes something like this: by studying the techniques employed by the CIA to overthrow foreign governments and replace them with more Western-friendly despots (sorry Reagan, “autocrats”) who are less hostile to the idea of contracting out their labor pools and natural resources to the U.S., and comparing these methods to those used by Nazi strategists and propagandists, Brussell discovered that the same tactics and even names recurred again and again. Her disquieting conclusion? The Third Reich didn’t die off after World War II, but rather was in effect absorbed secretly and purposefully into our own country’s highest echelons of government and industry and thrives to this day, acting as the invisible hand guiding our great big SUV down the road to ruin. Even though our government’s original goal was probably just to put all the German scientific know-how and insight to use for America, Brussell might say that we miscalculated. Hey, our leaders can’t think of everything. They were just giving top cabinet jobs to Nazi war criminals in order not to waste such bright minds. What could go wrong? Augmenting the speech footage are various inserts of interviews with her friends that paint a portrait of Brussell as a true believer, and this comes across in the film. The conviction and righteous indignation with which she dissects and reassembles lies into what she sees as hidden truths are akin to the zeal of a preacher out to save the souls of the unconverted. The film’s video and audio quality aren’t anything to write home about, but the chance to see Mae do her thing in front of a live audience of eager students is definitely worth the viewing. When she tells them (to paraphrase), “Your parents send you through our education system where they brainwash you for sixteen years, and if you once question it, they call you ungrateful,” the crowd erupts into applause. She comes across as sincere, earnest, and even humorous, and while you may scoff at some of her wilder connections, you’ve got to admire her dedication. For twenty five years she spoke her mind to anyone who would listen on her little radio program out of Carmel, California, and even though she’d been threatened with death multiple times (including once by Sandra Good of the Manson Family) and monitored by the FBI (who have a one hundred twenty page file on her), she soldiered on until her death in 1988 of cancer (her followers suspect foul play). If her speculations seem too outlandish to be true, consider this: she predicted RFK’s assassination to his wife a week before it happened, and after World War II the US did in fact pardon war criminals from both Japan and Germany, including employing over five hundred Nazi scientists from the Third Reich and the S.S. into what eventually became NASA under “Operation Paperclip.” Perhaps the idea that some of them retained patriotism to their homeland isn’t so farfetched. On the same token, it’d be a psychologist’s dream to examine Mae Brussell and make a case for her as a textbook Paranoid Personality or even Delusional Disorder. Yet the more you begin to examine the official record of history, the more you may find yourself wondering who’s been deluding who. -Andy Gately (reprinted from the Austin Underground Film Society)
From psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 tome of the same name, as well as his 1905 Textbook of Insanity, comes this 2006 film by Bret Wood, the writer/director who brought us the darkly hilarious and highly recommended 2003 documentary HELL’S HIGHWAY: THE TRUE STORY OF HIGHWAY SAFETY FILMS (2003). You’ve probably heard the name Krafft-Ebing before; his claim to fame was popularizing psychiatry and elevating discourse on sexual perversions into the realm of science, legitimizing them as medical conditions in a time when they were even more taboo and misunderstood than they are today. His vast influence is evident in the work of Freud (a contemporary of Ebing’s), Alfred Kinsey, and Jung, who was inspired to study psychology after reading Psychopathia Sexualis. Ebing gave his book its scientific title and wrote its more salacious passages in Latin, “to discourage the lay reader.” This is a good example of his complicated personality, for, while he might have only meant to deter people interested in the book solely for erotic purposes, this also kept knowledge exclusive to those who could afford an education. Then again, he also gave numerous public speeches on sexual psychopathy, and has probably done more to bring frank discussion of sex into the mainstream than anyone in history. Wood’s film provides an outstanding window into the good but conflicted doctor’s mind by adapting real case studies from the book in the form of vignettes, accompanied by Ebing’s fascinating commentary. Narration is so often used superfluously to tell us what we’re already seeing, or to lazily advance plot points that are easier said than done. It’s refreshing, then, to actually hear voiceover being used effectively; we get to listen to Ebing in his own words, complete with all his marvelous revelations and contradictions. And this is but one way in which the film brilliantly employs sound and picture to put us inside the head of a headshrinker. The film is beautifully shot and highly stylized, and yet it somehow manages to refrain from sensationalizing the delicate subject matter. In case you’re curious, this includes prostitution, pederasty, mutilation, lust murder, necrophilia, vampirism, leech bloodletting, mustache fetishes; pretty much every form of S&M you can fathom (incidentally both “sadism” and “masochism” were named by Ebing, the former after De Sade, the latter after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of Venus in Furs). But don’t let this scare you away, because no matter how lurid you might perceive the act in question to be, the filmmakers and the actors (especially standout Lisa Paulsen) do a marvelous job of avoiding the obvious temptation to exploit the many unorthodox sex acts practiced by the characters populating this film for cheap visceral effect. Like Todd Browning did in Freaks, the camera treats them respectfully (with almost no shock cuts) and mostly objectively. It all feels almost too detached at times, until you realize that this was clearly a conscious decision on the part of the artists. For by juxtaposing unflinching shots of these sympathetically portrayed characters next to Ebing’s highly judgmental narration, his frequent moralizing becomes more and more unsettling.
Take, for example, a scene where Ebing is going on about the “diseased conditions of the homosexual mind” while we’re shown the long unrequited love between two lesbian friends finally being consummated in a beautifully photographed and heartfelt union. Or the scene where he intones, “It’s quite common for hysteric paranoid women of insane asylums to complain of sexual violations by demonic or divine beings, often on a nightly basis,” as we’re being shown a doctor raping a restrained patient. His labeling of his subjects’ bedroom pastimes as “unnatural,” and his mingling of ethical and religious language with that of science with words like “tainted,” “polluted,” and “degeneracy,” all work to betray his hubris. “No soul is beyond redemption,” he once remarked. And to him, both homosexuality and onanism are “repugnant.” “I abhor the love of men, as it is against religion, nature and law,” he makes a gay man repeat under hypnosis aimed at “curing” him. He later writes of the same man, “Patient is showing signs of improvement; he discreetly requested the address of a brothel.” Ah, much healthier. The dangers of the scientist playing God come full circle in the epilogue, where we see how science can work toward supplanting religion. One of Ebing’s protégés boasts, “People will no longer go to judges and priests for answers, judges and priests will now come to us!” His patient then asks his doctor. “So you’re starting a church?” This surreal tone is furthered by David Bruckner’s outstanding German Expressionism-influenced cinematography, whose edge-blurred framing devices and repeated use of iris shots gives the viewer the discomforting feeling of a being a voyeur spying on these people through a peephole, or, perhaps, a microscope. In fact, every element of the movie works to complement the others, from the lighting to Paul Mercer’s eerie score to the many period details of costume and dance. There’s even a shadow puppet sequence that is both gorgeous and disturbing, in keeping with the entire movie. If only all those awful reenactments on the History Channel were this good. The film raises many questions about the modern day fields of psychology and psychiatry, and about how our legal system deals with these aberrations. Personally, if it’s consensual and doesn’t hurt anyone (unless, of course, that’s what they want), should anything be illegal? When private acts are criminalized, it just makes more criminals, many of whom are so repressed that the sex act becomes a guilty, joyless need that must be fulfilled illegally, and then never spoken about, like the masked orgy participants in Kubrick’s EYES WIDE SHUT. But what of the extreme cases? Are they immoral? Merely sick? Or is it society that sickens? PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS doesn’t provide us the answers, it challenges you to. -Andy Gately (reprinted from Cashiers du Cinemart) Bullfighting. The word itself is enough to illicit a cringe of distaste in the average person, and outrage from your typical liberal-minded Westerner. Yet, for thousands of Spaniards, seeing a ritual killing is just good, old-fashioned popcorn fun. You could drop a few Euro on the latest Sunday matinee, or, for even less, you could go see a raging bull or even a human being gored to death, live, and for real. “Maria, the kids want to go to that new Van Damme flick where he kick boxes his evil twin.” “Honey, we’re supposed to be saving money this month, you promised me I could get that veg-o-matic I’ve had my eye on, remember? Just take the kids to the bullfight, I’ve got coupons, and tonight it’s a triple-slaying.” Maybe the Spanish just know the value of a buck. And, given the amount of violence in the usual blockbuster film, are the two really all that different? The Matador unconsciously raises this question, and many others. Like most Americans, I knew next to nothing about bullfighting prior to seeing Stephen Higgins and Nina Gilden Seavey’s The Matador, other than it made me vaguely appalled to call myself a human being. It seemed amazing that such an archaic savagery could still exist in our day and age, and not only exist, but thrive. During bullfight season, stadiums of fans still come out each weekend to satisfy some dark recess of their primate brain than demands bloodsport. It’s easy to condemn such behavior as primitive and subhuman, but it’s far more enlightening to make an attempt at understanding the psychology at work here. So, in the spirit of journalistic inquiry, I steeled myself for some serious man-on-bull action and entered the dark theater like a torero entering the ring. The film focuses on young matador David Fandila on his quest to achieve one hundred corridas (fights) within a single season and thus secure his place among the handful of master Spanish toreros. We see his family life, his training with his tutor (a retired fighter), and the mental and physical discipline required to compete at his level and chosen vocation. The initially striking thing about The Matador is the cinematography, which is beautiful, that is if you can call big-screen high-definition images of cattle being creatively tortured and slaughtered by an effulgent butcher “beautiful.” Is bullfighting gratuitous? Of course. Morally reprehensible? Probably. Captivating? Completely. There is something about the sheer primality of this spectacle that pins you to your seat. And this film spares little in the way of gory details. With operatic stabbings, sanguinary lancings, slow-motion coup-de-grace’s to the skull, matadors and bulls impaling one another at point-blank range, there is carnage aplenty. The matadors are rewarded with cheers and roses if they demonstrate a flair for the theatrical while dealing their deathblows, which begs the question: just what exactly is bullfighting? Part sport, part art, part religious sacrifice – its origins lie in the bull worship of the ancient Mithras – and part bread and circus diversion for the oppressed masses (even sometimes referred to as “bread and bulls” by Spanish intellectuals), bullfighting is only one thing for certain: all drama. Whether or not bullfighting is a legitimate sport, much less an art, it commands a certain amount of awe in the virgin spectator. And let’s not mince words: at its heart, bullfighting is nothing more than a smarter animal killing a stupider animal for sadistic amusement. A butcher is still a butcher, even when you festoon him in a gold suit and snazzy hat. And yet, like the sinister choreography of a S.W.A.T. team sweeping a room, there is a ballet playing out here. A good bullfighter, when paired with a good bull, can literally make it dance. Inches away from one another, the lethal interplay between bull and man can soar to heights of brutal poetry untouchable in the annals of sport. Like ice hockey, bloodletting is intrinsic to the sport of bullfighting. Unlike hockey, deaths are commonplace. While hockey has a special tool just to scrape blood off the ice, bullfighting often has a surgeon on hand who specializes in horn wounds, as well as a Catholic priest, to administer last rites in the event of a fatality. Take that, Gretzky.
If the macho thing does it for you, then even the worst matador makes Brett Favre look like a lace curtain nancy-boy. To paraphrase Hemingway, bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in constant danger of death. There’s also an undeniable erotic element to the whole affair. Its three stages mimic the rising action and climax of the not only a theatrical play but the sex act, culminating in the final thrust of the matador’s phallic sword, penetrating between the bull’s shoulder blades and directly into the heart. In the first stage, the three matadors are introduced by trumpet fanfare as they take a ceremonious parade lap around the arena and salute any dignitaries present. Then the fighters are typically paired with two bulls apiece, and the picadors, mounted on blinded, sometimes drugged-up horses, one at a time render the bull weakened via spear incisions to the top of its neck, drawing first blood. This serves not only to antagonize the animal, but to lower its blood pressure and thus, in an unexpectedly humane twist, decrease its pain. During this phase, the matador closely observes the behavior of his bull to learn clues that could prove the difference between life and death in the ensuing fight. The horses wear armor these days, but used to go naked, which often ended in their literal disembowelment at the horns of the bull. In the second stage, the matador takes the arena with his capote, or pink and white dress cape, where he taunts the bull and further studies its behavior and aggressive tendencies while putting on as best a show as he can to the crowd, i.e. getting as close as he dares to the animal during its passes, turning his back to it, and sidestepping its charges in highly stylized maneuvers. Every bull has his own distinct personality, the film explains, and no lesson learned from one bull can be applied to all. Next, the banderillos, or flagmen, place three barbed darts on the bull’s flank, and the final stage begins when the iconic red cape, or muleta, comes out, along with a blade, courtesy of a sword page. That bulls see only red is a misconception; they are in fact colorblind and the cape’s color is chosen to hide the splashes of blood. The consummation is the most dangerous part of the death-dance, as the matador is most exposed to the horns when delivering the fatal piercing. If executed correctly, requiring the utmost skill, it results in a quick and what is known as a “clean” kill. If the bull does not fall instantly, but instead limps about bleeding (a depressing sight to even these fans, apparently), a sword through the head is often required as a mercy kill and the matador is considered to have botched the job, such dishonor eliciting much booing from the crowd. When interviewed about his stance on the morality of his profession, Fandila raises some novel arguments. After acknowledging the barbarism of bullfighting, he says he respects it as a tradition and points out that the bull’s meat is not wasted but sold following each match. At least the bull has a chance to defend itself, he offers, which is more than your Thanksgiving turkey can say. Granted, a turkey probably wouldn’t stand much of a chance against its hunter, but point taken. It also turns out that when a bull puts on an especially good show and fights valiantly, the crowd or the matador can choose to spare its life, Roman-style. The filmmakers then cut to a shot of several old bulls reposing on a Spanish pasture, in a moment of disarming poignancy. Displaying the scars from their brushes with death, each animal possesses about it a kind of serenity and quiet dignity, as if it knows it was given the ultimate test, and earned its status as a survivor. In this way, a brave bull can earn its freedom. While this is no doubt small solace to animal rights activists, who protest the sport all over the world, bullfighting remains protected in Spain ever since Franco, under the auspices of patriotism and preserving national culture, declared it the country’s national sport, similar to the way Santeria priests can sacrifice chickens in the US under freedom of religion, and rabbis can assist in infant circumcision using their mouths. Interesting offshoots of bullfighting include the Basque-Navarre style, which is nonviolent and is enjoying a revival, and certain American rodeo practices such as bullriding. There’s even a nonviolent California bullfighting league. The Matador provides a welcome window into a practice that, while seemingly appalling and without redeeming value to Western eyes, reveals itself to be a much more complex tradition rich with Old World heritage, moral and ethical contradictions, outmoded notions of valor and heroism, and modern gladiatorial spectacle. Bullfighting is possibly the only surviving sport that, along with Greco-Roman wrestling, can be traced directly back to the Coliseum. And given the popularity of the NFL, the WCW, and NASCAR virtually replacing the quaint-by-comparison game of baseball as the national pastime, is bullfighting really all that anachronistic? It’s as if our queasiness as Americans at bullfighting is due to its hitting too close to home, its showing us just where our modern concepts of competition originate: in war, which is always just senseless violence for its own sake, when you get right down to it, for the glorification of the male ego. “This is what you really want, so take it or leave it,” the matador is saying. As if bullfighting, by its very existence, challenges our values of fair play, athleticism, hero worship; reveals all our ball games as mere simulacra. As if bullfighting, by its very existence, is saying to everyone around it who is more cultured, “This is sport.” -Andy Gately (reprinted from Short End Magazine)
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Dir. Paul Schrader, 1985) An appropriately florid attempt to capture onto film the essence of one of the 20th Century’s most confounding artists, Yukio Mishima, who was, by turns, a great novelist in the tradition of Thomas Mann, a popular celebrity, a filmmaker, a libertine, a strident militarist, a self-styled samourai & a national joke. Such a wildly contradictory life, with so many confusing tangents, allow director Schrader (Cat People, American Gigolo, Hardcore, Auto Focus) a multitude of voices, both visually & narratively. In 1972, before Schrader penned the script to Taxi Driver while living in the backseat of his car, he wrote a book called Trascendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, a seminal text suggesting that the films of the given directors, despite differences in locale & cultural landscape, aim to express, in a similar fashion, that which lies beyond human experience or comprehension. A famous quote from the book says that films “cannot inform one of the Transcendent, they can only be expressive of the Transcendent.” While this expressive impotence could easily explain why so many film students find the films of Ozu, Bresson & Dreyer deathly dull, it could easily be used to describe the pitfalls in telling a life as enigmatic as Mishima’s. Swap out the word Transcendent for Mishima in the quote & you’ll see what Schrader was up against. Mishima is, perhaps, his most Transcendental film, and not just because he gets a chance to imitate the styles of his favorite directors, especially Ozu, whose influence is deeply felt in the stark black & white sequences of the author’s childhood. Between the writer’s odd, secluded childhood & his black-comic ritual suicide in the offices of the Eastern Command in Tokyo (which bookend the various chapters of the film), we are treated to some of the most gorgeous, technicolor artifice since Douglas Sirk, scenes whose textures are so vivid as to demand a tactile response & performances (most importantly that of the brilliant Ken Ogata, as the older Mishima) that engage while only deepending the mysteries of Mishima’s crowded life. Mishima is most certainly Paul Schrader’s crown jewel as a director (Blue Collar running a close second), and it’s a landmark of biographical cinema, a way of intimating instead of telling that will one day, hopefully, allow for a film treatment of the life of Celine. Most highly recommended.
The Night Stalker (Dir. Max Kleven, 1987) Great Z-Movie hard-ass Charles Napier (Ed. Note: Too much crap for a parenthetical overview) stars as sweaty, alcoholic detective J. J. Striker (is that an, um, Dickensian name?) who, while protecting a whole gaggle (murder?) of prostitutes with hearts of cotton candy, becomes a big sweaty alcoholic juggernaut to track down a whore-killer who, for some reason, is impervious to bullets. It may have something to do with the very weird, phased-out, Alvin Chipmunk voodoo chants that fill his (and, by extension, our…) head when he’s about to kill, kill, kill. Watching Napier drink in this film actually made me want to stop drinking altogether. Thankfully the flick was only 93 minutes long. Dodged a bullet on that one.
Classe Tous Risques (Dir. Claude Sautet, 1960) Director Claude Sautet was primarily known for a series of launguidly paced, pellucidly lensed melodramas & equally drowsy comedies (usually starring the great Romy Schneider) virtually unseen by American audiences wedged as they were between the monumental works of Jean Renoir & Jean-Pierre Melville & the revolutionary cinema of the nouvelle vague. His clean, somewhat melancholy style, while always cerebral & artistic, didn’t call much attention to itself in the clamorous rarefied air of post-war French film culture. Classe Tous Risques (The Big Risk) is the closest the director came to making a genre film and, for the most part, it breaks all the rules of the gangster noir. Most aberrent is the cool black & white cinematography of Ghislain Cloquet, whose aversion to closed, artificial spaces quite suavely undercuts the genre’s predilection for shadowy, claustrophobic spaces. French B-Movie staple Lino Ventura stars as Abel Davos, a gangster on the lam in Italy with his wife & two sons. In order to return to France, Davos & crony Raymond pull a gutsy, almost playful broad-daylight payroll heist & high-tail it home by boat. Upon reaching shore in the wee hours, Raymond & Davos’ wife are killed by the police & the gangster must throw himself on the mercy of old comrades who owe him a great deal but find this debt tedious, to say the least. The scene-stealing actor who plays Raymond, Stan Krol, is a mystery. According to IMDB he only appeared in three films but he has all the presence & hulking charm of the young Lee Marvin. As far as I can tell, through some admittedly cursory internet research, little to nothing is known about Krol, but it’s easy — if you’re unfamiliar with the film’s more famous actors — to assume at the film’s outset that Krol is going to be the leading man. Though Davos’ underworld contacts have become banal bureaucrats (a common theme in late period crime films, coming to a glorious head in John Boorman’s Point Blank, Don Siegel’s The Killers & Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia!), they do manage to connect him with one of Raymond’s old friends, Eric Stark (Jean Paul Belmondo, who made Godard’s Breathless the same year). The film keeps coming to life around its peripheral characters. It’s not that Lino Ventura lacks charisma. In fact, he balances the melancholy of a recent widower with a master criminal’s ruthless cunning effortlessly. Still, Classe Tous Risques is always haunted by the death of Raymond & takes delirious flight when Belmondo is onscreen. The uncomplicated friendship between Stark & Davos serves as a beautiful counterpoint to the shadier environs of the Parisian mob. Raymond & Stark are represented by open fields, open windows, open waters, but his relationship with the other kingpins is all cramped rooms & low ceilings. Sautet’s film is a strange one. It keeps becoming different types of movies as it progresses (love story, light comedy, provincial soap opera), but it never grows tiresome or lags in tension & this odd meandering quality actually imbues the inexorable crime film ending with devastating gravity. An oddball classic & highly recommended.
Inglorious Bastards (Dir. Enzo Castellari, 1978)
Critics have been frothing at the mouth about the re-release of this Italian war film on DVD, but it’s a little underwhelming when it comes right down to it. Produced in 1978, a little late to cash-in on its obvious influences, The Dirty Dozen (1967) & Kelly’s Heroes (1970), Inglorious Bastards is a favorite of Quentin Tarantino, who’s remaking it as we speak, starring Brad Pitt, Simon Pegg & Eli Roth. While the movie’s colorful, sometimes rousing & benefits from a decent budget, if you’ve seen a few irreverent war films of the late 60s & early 70s, there’s nothing here that wasn’t done much, much better in, say, The Dirty Dozen & Kelly’s Heroes (you can throw in Where Eagles Dare & The Great Escape, if you need more evidence).
Most of Inglorious Bastards‘ gags are nimble as lead, the characterizations are mostly impoverished borrowings from other films (especially Nick, the anachronistic hippie thief obviously modeled on Donald Sutherland’s Sgt. Oddball in Kelly’s Heroes) & the action set-pieces in the first 45 minutes are about as kinetic as action sequences from 1970s TV shows. These shortfalls are somewhat mitigated by likable performances from Fred Williamson (MASH, Black Caesar) & Bo Svenson (Walking Tall, Part 2 & Kill Bill, Vol. 2), a bucolic lake filled with naked, machine-gun toting bathing beauties, a weird B-Movie performance by Peter Hooten (coming off, for all the world, like a flaming homosexual, but voicing lines you’d expect from Telly Savalas), some cool slow-motion Peckinpah-style shootouts & a batshit crazy train crash in the final quarter & Bo Svenson disarming a V2 rocket with a pencil. As for the plot itself — bound for prison, unorthodox renegade soldiers escape from custody & somehow wind up winning WWII for the allies — the intrigue pretty much boils down to one line, uttered by Svenson: “Nick, Tony, Berle…Dress up like Germans & let’s get out of here!” So the trick to viewing Inglorious Bastards? Stick with it, or liberally implement your Fast Forward device.
The Perfume of Yvonne (D: Patrice Leconte, 1994)
Leconte’s (Monsieur Hire, Girl on the Bridge) The Perfume of Yvonne is a tingling erotic homage to the best work of Tinto Brass, Jesus Franco & Radley Metzger, a sumptuous period piece that dabbles in politics, literature & art, but revels deliriously in desire. It’s intellectual pornography (ala Georges Bataille or Alberto Moravia) of the first order… Filmed in a mixture of the pellucid, sun-drenched style of 60s Italian & French cinerotica & the dark – almost noir – style of Italian gialli, Leconte’s film delights in fetishistic surfaces, in starched white shirts, in blowing flags, drapes & sun dresses, in the rumpled tailored suits & scarves of European expatriates & the mottled brown leather of well-traveled suitcases. It’s so vivid you can almost smell the blend of opium & sea brine. A lush orchestral score cries out for Edda Dell’Orso’s wordless vocals, but shimmers gorgeously without it as well. The story is relatively simple, though spiced with exotic mysteries that are – wisely I think – never quite resolved. Victor, a young Russian count adrift in Europe in 1958, living off of the intermittent sale of rarities from his family’s renowned butterfly collection (shades of Nabokov), crosses paths with a cryptically beautiful actress named Yvonne & her elderly, flamboyantly gay, traveling companion, Dr. Meinthe. Jean-pierre Marielle, a veteran of 60s & early 70s sexploitation/giallo, shines here as the world-weary doctor who drinks his port wine with a straw, sports a Karl May fez & shouts to all within earshot that he’s “The Queen of Belgium.” Meinthe is equal parts George Sanders, Peter Lorre & William Burroughs, the sort of man who finds conscience distasteful, but is consumed by it nonetheless. Victor & Yvonne are soon in the grip of sexual obsession & while more heady themes of exile, film history & the onset of the Algerian conflict may fleck their bubble of mutual need, sex is the star here & it’s most likely the copious nudity & enraptured love-making you’ll remember about the film. Well, that & the not-so-good doctor. This is pornography for people who like to read Marguerite Duras or Andre Gide aloud to one another before & after they screw.
The Killing Kind (Dir. Curtis Harrington, 1973) Curtis Harrington is one of the great unsung Hollywood directors, notable for bringing underground & experimental inclinations (he worked with both Kenneth Anger & Maya Deren) to off-beat, low-budget drive-in fare such as Night Tide (a cult classic from 1961 starring Dennis Hopper), Games (a lost classic from 1967), How Awful About Allen (1970), What’s the Matter with Helen?, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo (both from 1971) & this sick tale of psycho-sexual perversion, starring Ann Sothern (TV’s My Mother the Car, Joseph Mankiewicz’s Letter to Three Wives, 1949), John Savage (1978’s The Deer Hunter, 1979’s Hair), Luana Anders (Night Tide, The Trip, Easy Rider), Ruth Roman (The Baby, Go Ask Alice) & an impossibly young Cindy Williams (Laverne & Shirley). Savage plays a very troubled young man with a deeply unhealthy mother complex who returns home after serving time for his negligible part in a gang rape. Between poolside glasses of chocolate milk delivered fawningly by his mother, Savage seeks revenge on his lawyer & the girl who framed him. Prison has also left our mama’s boy with some unhealthy sexual proclivities which he proceeds to inflict on the young women of Los Angeles, including his mother’s boarder, Cindy Williams, who actually finds the obviously deranged young man kinda cute. As with all Harrington films, there’s Hollywood gothic to spare in The Killing Kind, a tough, grim humor embedded in every twisted scene. Highly recommended.
The Velvet Vampire (Dir. Stephanie Rothman, 1971) As bluesman Johnny Shines (in a great, atmospheric, uncredited cameo) plays some deep hoodoo in the shadows at a gallery opening in Los Angeles, a young couple meet & befriend a mysterious woman named Diane LeFanu (Celeste Yarnall, excellent here) who invites them to spend a weekend at her house in the middle of the desert. Once there, both are plagued – well, perhaps “plagued” is the wrong word – with nightmares & feverishly erotic dreams involving their hostess. There are great touches of Manson-family paranoia folded chaotically into the otherwise fairly straightforward vampire tale & the desert locales add some eerie new ingredients to familiar grue. Director Rothman was one of the few women helming films in the Corman New World stable & she acquits herself beautifully here, in the previous year’s Student Nurses & in 1977’s directorial “pairing” with Curtis Harrington, Ruby. Recommended.
Play Dirty (Andre De Toth, 1968) A late-period masterpiece from 50s genre director Andre De Toth, Play Dirty is an overlooked classic. De Toth, who helmed some of the great B-Westerns of the 50s & 60s, as well as a fine horror film (House of Wax) & a couple of inventive film noirs, re-emerged firing on every cylinder in 1968 for this ultimately downbeat, absurdist British war film. There are moments that prefigure Peckinpah (brutal violence & a scene where villagers watch a scorpion battle a bonfire), some reverential nods to John Ford (The Searchers & She Wore a Yellow Ribbon are referenced lovingly) & an utterly sophisticated manner of indulging Vietnam-era malaise while still making a riveting WWII action film. In fact, Play Dirty renders the anachronistic subcultural smirk of Kelly’s Heroes (which I also love) seem patently juvenile & makes the anti-hero antics of The Dirty Dozen seem polite & naively patriotic. More miraculous, De Toth captures the ennui without the tone of the film ever becoming self-righteously grim.
Set during WWII in North Africa, Play Dirty manages to include characters straight out of Paul Bowles’ Tangiers stories — two kief-addicted flaming homosexuals, cynical poppy-runner expatriates & a raft of other intelligent but lost souls who — because they know the desert & have few qualms about the distinction between murder & warfare — get caught up in the British campaign against the Nazis to avoid long prison sentences. Although Michael Caine is the ostensible star of the movie, it’s Nigel Davenport (A Man For All Seasons, Look Back in Anger, Peeping Tom) who runs the military operation — an epic, mordantly exotic trek across the desert to blow up a Nazi fuel hub. Michael Caine plays their Captain superior but we’re almost an hour into this remarkable film before we see him as anything but an unwary prig, a chess–playing martinet not unlike Henry Fonda in John Ford’s Fort Apache. Mostly unobtrusive, but often wildly expressionistic photography — think the zoom-happy renegade verite chic of Altman films melded with the colorful artifice of early Nicholas Ray or Robert Aldrich — from another revivified old-timer, Edward Scaife, turns the jeep ride across North Africa from surreal to infernal to hallucinatory without so much as one ragged seam. The scene where the outfit (only Caine is an actual British soldier) finally confronts the sandstorm-swept Potemkin’s Village they’ve been sent out to destroy is equal parts Wizard of Oz & Samuel Beckett, a truly inspired set-piece unrivaled by any war movie this side of Douglas Sirk’s Erich Maria Remarque adaptation A Time to Live & A Time to Die. There’s even an ubiquitous late 60s rape scene that begins as unpleasantly as any 42nd Street Grindhouse roughie & then about-faces brilliantly into light humor. This is highly recommended. One wonders why Quentin Tarantino would want to have a go at a piece of really sketchy cheese like Inglorious Bastards when this brutal, funny & often amoral war movie remains vastly unseen.
Crime Wave/Decoy (Dir. Andre De Toth, 1954/Jack Bernard, 1946) Part of Warner Home Video’s Film Noir Double Feature series, this volume is the best of the bunch. It’s hard to believe Andre De Toth’s Crime Wave isn’t mentioned in the same breath as John Huston’s Asphalt Jungle, Joseph Lewis’ The Big Combo or Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat. What it lacks in intricacy & scope, it more than makes up for with a brutal linearity, startling Los Angeles location photography, and no-nonsense hardboiled performances from Sterling Hayden, Charles Bronson (then Charles Bunchinski), Dub Taylor, Jay Novello (amazing here as the bent, but dapper, Dr. Otto Hessler), Timothy Carey (performing, as usual, according to his own strange muse), and Gene Nelson, who’s better known for hoofing through frothy musicals than for this sort of hard-bitten anti-hero. Nelson plays an ex-con gone straight who’s caught between intractable cop Hayden & a band of escaped prison acquaintances engaged in the titular crime wave. Still, the best thing about this DVD is the commentary track by feral crime writer & L.A. historian James Ellroy. If there’s the shot of an alley in Crime Wave, he takes you down it & tells you which dumpster a real-life gangster moll’s corpse was found behind in 1950. Amazing. On the same disc is Decoy, a lesser gem that suffers from too much plot & too little money to make it tick & some pretty creaky performances by a cast of relative unknowns. On the plus side, there are some spooky German Expressionist touches throughout that make it worthwhile viewing. Crime Wave: Highly Recommended/Decoy: Recommended.
House of Games (David Mamet, 1987) Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet’s first film consolidates most of the motifs & most of the cast, for that matter, that he would continue to use in his next 10 or so pictures. Then-wife Lindsay Crouse stars as a renowned psychologist who approaches gambler Joe Mantegna in order to get one of her patients released from a gambling debt. But, as in all great Mamet plays/movies (Glengarry Glen Ross, The Spanish Prisoner, Things Change, Spartan), nothing is as it seems & the psychologist/author is lured into a world of elaborate artifice concocted by a genius con men (including the late, great J. T. Walsh & Mamet regular, magician Ricky Jay) who use her intellectual fascination against her. It’s an inventive, truly original directorial debut, filmed in a smudgy ashcan style (splendidly revived by this Criterion re-issue), and given strict momentum by the dangerous crossfire of all that rhythmic, elliptical Mamet dialogue. Recommended.
Star Knight (Dir. Fernando Colomo, 1985) I’m not sure this shoddy Italian production really needed to find its way from whatever vault junk like this hides in, but if you’re looking for a strange, light-hearted (though never intentionally funny), rapturously ill-conceived, no-budget cross between John Boorman’s Excalibur, Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky & Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this might wet your whistle. Benevolent court alchemist Klaus Kinski attempts to conjure a supernatural being to help him turn lead to gold & somehow conjures a spaceship instead. The vassals and serfs think the spaceship is a dragon because it sucks goats into the sky, flies through the night sky lit up like a disco ball & makes the swamp water roil. In order to win the heart of the princess, an incompetent knight played by – ready? – Harvey Keitel, sets out to kill the dragon/spaceship. Unfortunately, the princess has already fallen in love with the lone alien inside, a sad, anemic cross between David Bowie in Man Who Fell to Earth and Vanilla Ice, who speaks in ringtones & collects the spirits of pets from other worlds. For me, it was worth it to hear Keitel utter lines such as (and I’ve transcribed these verbatim) “Sire, surely thou cans’t not doubt my forceful courage – a hundred trials have I fought forsooth & triumphed over each one,” “Happy beats my heart when thou do I see,” & “Come out, ye dastardly poltroon! Art thou a man or a field mouse?”
THE ARRANGEMENT (Dir. Elia Kazan, 1969)
Half-John Cheever/Half-Jackie Susann, The Arrangement jumps off the starting blocks as one of the great screeds against the Organization Man, the button-down miracle-worker who haunts post-war Madison Avenue & Cape Cod, torn between Hemingway & Doyle, Dane, Bernbach. Kirk Douglas plays a second-generation Greek American who sells out his literary dreams to hawk cigarettes for a big advertising agency. He treats his matronly wife (a terribly wasted Deborah Kerr) like excess baggage, falls for his troubled young mistress (an altogether confusing Faye Dunaway) and goes completely haywire trying to live the American Dream. Unfortunately, by mid-film, The Arrangement loses all its sexy pop-art zip & degenerates into broad comedy, maudlin ethnicity, hysteria-pitched performances, and the kind of jarring, smash-mouth camera technique that make you long for the days when a jump-cut was a technical embarrassment. Frank Perry’s terse & bracing The Swimmer says as much in half the time.
Bunny Lake is Missing (Dir. Otto Preminger, 1965) A very creepy cross between Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and the Jodie Foster vehicle, Flightplan, Otto Preminger pulls out all the stops in this tale of a mother (Carol Lynley) and her troubled brother (Keir Dullea) searching London for Lynley’s missing daughter (the titular Bunny), who may or not have existed at all. We get great bit parts from Noel Coward (spouting De Sade like he knew the man), Laurence Olivier, Anne Massey & rock group, The Zombies. We get all manner of jokey clues as to the twisted psychology at play – a cuckoo clock chiming at opportune moments, a very eerie doll factory, a rocking horse. We get subtle hints of incest, plot revelations that will leave your mouth agape, and sinister atmosphere courtesy of cinematographer Denys Coop & composer Paul Glass, who contributes a strikingly minimalist jazz score. This is this week’s Lost Classic from the ‘60s #1.
Cameraman’s Revenge & Other Fantastic Tales: The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912)/The Insects’ Christmas (1913)/Frogland (1922)/Voice of the Nightingale (1923)/The Mascot (1933)/Winter Carousel (1958) (Dir. Ladislaw Starewicz) These sepia-delic films by the Russian pioneer of stop-motion animation still have the powerful ability to shrink you down to insect size and set your imagination loose in a glittering, nostalgic diorama. Like the work of Brothers Quay, Rankin-Bass & Art Clokey, there’s something about these films that enter the subconscious mind without being intercepted by reason, wit, or ego. Although it certainly seems oxymoronic, these shorts have a primal delicacy, and these anthropomorphized frogs, insects, bears, rabbits, Christmas ornaments, toys and demonic vegetables exist not as if in a dream, but as the dream itself. Rent these, take a couple of Vicodin, and see where the night takes you…
Desperate Teenage Love Dolls (Dave Markey, 1984) Coming on like a good-natured Nick Zedd, Dave Markey & the boys from Redd Kross dive headfirst into this primal punk rock take on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls & defy you not to join the party. Despite zero production values and completely unhinged performances by unapologetic non-actors, Desperate Teenage Love Dolls gets by on rock’n’roll spirit alone. An underground classic that won’t leave a bitter taste in your mouth.
Lilith (Dir. Robert Rossen, 1964) Lost Classic of the 1960s, No. 2. An unstable Korean War vet (Warren Beatty) returns to his hometown and procures a position at the local mental hospital where he meets and falls for the sexually omnivorous Lilith (Jean Seberg, luminescent and perfectly acting the fine line between naivete & feral carnality). It’s perfectly scripted, filmed immaculately in watery black & white, contains unforgettable performances by Beatty, Seberg, Peter Fonda, Gene Hackman (his eye-opening film debut), Kim Hunter, and Jessica Walter (the mother on Arrested Development), and makes you about as sexually uncomfortable as an American film could make you in 1964.
BAND OF ANGELS (Dir. Raoul Walsh, 1957)
If you long to see Gone With The Wind seedily groped by the grindhouse pleasures of Mandingo, here’s your chance. The sweaty subtleties of deep south literature almost invariably made it to the screen with one silk bra strap down the left shoulder and a leering old man (Burl Ives or Orson Welles — your pick…) sipping juleps on the big veranda. In other words, unrecognizable as literature; wildly marketable as cypress sleaze.
Based on a sod-busting Robert Penn Warren novel (see Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men, 1949), this film boasts a voodoo-sexy performance by the late, great Yvonne DeCarlo (Lily Munster, for the uninitiated), and a star-making turn from Sidney Poitier that nearly preserves the novel’s hot-headed social consciousness.
CAPRICE (Dir. Frank Tashlin, 1967)
Hmm. I always feel like Frank Tashlin — who gave us Porky Pig, Jayne Mansfield, Jerry Lewis and Tony Randall – directed films the way some people flounce scarves over bedside lamps and forget about the naked girl waiting anxiously under the covers. Like Roger Vadim, maybe. Caprice is particularly excruciating, because Doris Day is past her prime and Richard Harris would, quite obviously, rather be drinking with Peter O’Toole. Tashlin barely notices. To him, she’s Jayne Mansfield, or a meatier Suzanne Pleshette with wattles. He’s Cary Grant. Could we be happier?
And she’ll look fine in this mired-in-its-own-production-design thriller. When she gasps into a leather glove, it’s like she’s gasping into a floating French cuff. She may as well be Sandy Duncan. There was never a script, never an idea…just characters forced to walk through beautiful designs in outrageously-technicolored hats and gowns. If that’s where you hang your pill-box monkey usher hat, this is the re-issue for you.
LOOKER (Michael Crichton, 1981)
This marks the tail-end of Hollywood studios marketing paranoid, satirical thrillers (Winter Kills, Capricorn One, Stepford Wives, Three Days of the Condor, etc.) as irony-free action fare, and they didn’t expect these hijinx from a cash-machine like Crichton. While Looker is nowhere near as subtle as the aforementioned films, it still walks that giddy borderline between dark social satire and the science fiction menace Crichton had all-but perfected in Coma, Terminal Man, Westworld, and Andromeda Strain.
Looker is a confusing mess in any form. No amount of commentary or additional footage will turn this into the David Cronenberg film it so desperately longs to be. After performing suspect plastic surgery on two supermodels, surgeon Albert Finney is accused of murdering the both of them, and must take it on the lam with friend and model, Susan Dey (post-Partridge/pre-L.A. Law). Most of the once-troubling ideas in this film now seem quaint – the corporate homogenization of beauty, the plasticity of computer images, etc. Looker still has those ‘70s jitters, though — oddball pacing, a truly disquieting car chase, and more than its share of puzzling, ragged edges that separate it entirely from the clean, precise speculative cinema to come.
After Dark, My Sweet (Dir. James Foley, 1990)
The Jim Thompson novel on which this is based has one conceit I wasn’t sure if a movie version could pull off. A rogue’s gallery of observant characters who encounters “Kid” Collins, a punch-drunk ex-fighter, in the first part of the book notice immediately that he’s off-kilter, and often ask him outright how long he’d been in a mental hospital. Still, Collins has to be charming & handsome enough to be the hard-boiled protagonist. Jason Patric (Narc, Rush) pull it off, though, by turning his head to the side just so when he doesn’t understand the gist of the schemes going on around him, as if waiting (Anticipating? Longing?) for the 2 X 4 of bad luck to swing around once more & catch him in the jaw. And here his eyes reveal a capacity for masochism that, while utterly pathological, give him a distinct one-up on the dapper, eloquent kidnapper, Bruce Dern, and his lovely moll, Rachel Ward. Though they think they have Collins stringing along like a dancing bear, they have no idea what he’s capable of once he gets his thick head around said gist. This ranks – along with Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1972), Stephen Frears’ The Grifters (also 1990), Maggie Greenwald’s The Kill-Off (1989) & Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup De Torchon (1981) – among the best of the Jim Thompson adaptations. It seethes with his brutally perverse narrative momentum, flexing dialogue & decidedly un-telegraphed violence. Recommended as hell.
Heavy Petting (Dir. Obie Benz, 1989)
Heavy Petting is a first class cultish, hipster peep show, featuring all manner of entertaining clips from ‘50s classroom sex & hygiene films, blue movie ephemera, and quaint, coy bits from old television shows, all strung together by revealing interviews with oh-so-hip beatniks (Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs), performance artists (Laurie Anderson), underground rock icons (David Byrne, Ann Magnuson) & fringe celebrities (Zoe Lund, Spalding Gray, Sandra Bernhard, Josh Mostel). This Who’s Who of “Who’s that?” talk with varying degrees of chronic glibness about their first sexual experiences and all of them are first-rate storytellers of the Downtown NYC art scene variety, peppering their anecdotes with just enough superiority to make sure you know the difference between their sex and, um, your sex. Most entertaining: Allen Ginsberg talking in flowery exclamation points about his love affair with Bill Burroughs, while Burroughs leans on his cane, rolls his eyes & hrrumphs like Mark Twain’s reanimated mummy.
Obsession (Dir. Brian De Palma, 1976)
A dull, tame, soft-filtered shrugging off of Vertigo & Rebecca by the undisputed master of adding ragged exploitation film sleaze & gore to Hitchcock’s perverse mathematical film-puzzles. If you’re looking for another lurid Body Double, Sisters, Blow Out, or Dressed to Kill, forget it. Despite the eyebrow-raising, but laughable, “surprise” ending, this is not only Hitchcock lite, but De Palma lite, and offers zero titillation & none of the cool De Palma set pieces that normally salvage even his most egregious projects. For God’s sake, he doesn’t even let the reliably hammy John Lithgow cut loose for our amusement. So dull even incest can’t save it.
Radio On (Dir. Christopher Petit, 1980)
This snail’s pace British road movie co-produced by Wim Wenders & lensed by Wenders regular Martin Schafer, has visual style to spare, but you may not want to watch it without a pot of coffee on hand. A London DJ drives to Bristol to investigate his brother’s suicide, finds more ennui along the road (despite a jarringly friendly interlude with fellow Eddie Cochran fan, Sting, at a gas station) & eventually treks back home. The black & white cinematography outright shimmers, as if the world were made of chrome & the beautiful soundtrack, from Kraftwerk, Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury, David Bowie, Lene Lovich, and others, floats in and out like radio transmissions from another world. It really is a gorgeous film, but it’s also slooooow going.
Silent Partner (Dir. Daryl Duke, 1978)
Elliot Gould plays a grossly underestimated shopping mall bank teller who finds a “practice” hold-up note on a bank receipt & begins playing a very dangerous cat-and-mouse game with sicko bank robber Christopher Plummer. Gould is perfect as the crafty schlub who begins to appear more attractive to everyone around him (fellow bank clerks Susannah York, John Candy, and bombshell Gail Dahms, as well as Plummer’s lady friend Celine Lomez) as the game progresses. Just when you start fearing the whole affair will surrender to antic playfulness, Plummer will beat a girl to death in a sauna or decapitate another using a shattered fish tank. The movie’s kind of a mess and we begin to wonder a little too soon whether career criminal Plummer is really any kind of match for Gould at all, but scene-for-scene it’s wildly entertaining and, best of all, unique in its shrewd approach to crafting characters & ability to shift tones on a dime without losing crucial momentum.
Steelyard Blues (Dir. Alan Myerson, 1973)
Despite a great cast of late-‘60s/early-‘70s stalwarts – Donald Sutherland, Peter Boyle, Howard Hesseman, Jane Fonda, and John Savage – it doesn’t take long for this shaggy dog tale to succumb to terminal whimsy. Oddballs, led by ex-con Sutherland, try to rebuild a scuttled twin-engine flying boat to escape responsibility, gainful employment, and THE MAN, here personified by Sutherland’s police captain brother, Howard Hesseman. The movie tries for a melancholy sort of madcap, but never once puts enough on the line for us to care about any of the people involved, and the vile sunshiny pop from Paul Butterfield, Maria Muldaur & Nick Gravenites? The less said about that, the better. It’s probably a bad sign in one of the movie’s first scenes when Sutherland has to revive his Hawkeye whistle from Altman’s M*A*S*H to get a laugh.
Billy Budd (Dir. Peter Ustinov, 1962)
Splendid adaptation of Herman Melville’s tale of a merchant seaman (Terence Stamp) impressed into service on a British naval vessel & accidentally killing a sadistic master-at-arms (Robert Ryan). The court martial proceedings are beautifully rendered & highly combustible, raising all of Melville’s philosophical concerns about good & evil without sacrificing narrative tension.
Cinderella Liberty (Dir. Mark Rydell, 1973)
Navy man James Caan, docked in Seattle for the night, wins hooker Marsha Mason in a pool game, and proceeds to fall in love with her, despite small drawbacks like her 10-year old mulatto son and, um, her job. Great, grainy atmosphere and a bang-up supporting cast (Eli Wallach, Sally Kirkland, Burt Young, Dabney Coleman…) make up for the usual strained performance from Mason, who always looks like she’s on the verge of spraining something.
Cisco Pike (Dir. Bill L. Norton, 1972)
Just released from prison on drug charges, has-been rock singer Kris Kristofferson’s plans to go straight are seriously impeded by crooked narcotics officer, Gene Hackman, who blackmails him into selling $10,000 worth of stolen pot. Hackman’s slimy & sly as a swamp in June, Kristofferson plays lost honor with his usual clenched jaw and hundred-yard squint, Karen Black has the requisite world-weary sensuality, and Harry Dean Stanton, Joy Bang, and Doug Sahm give that fine 70s downbeat some crucial hangdog atmosphere. Recommended.
John & Mary (Dir. Peter Yates, 1969)
A one-night stand between a furniture designer (Dustin Hoffman) and an art gallery assistant (Mia Farrow) leads to much well-intentioned introspection (always so good on film) over the nature of love and attraction. Peter Yates gets fine, subtle performances from the two leads and the upscale NYC locations have the same reliably distancing effect they have in Mike Nichols’ Closer. It’s talky and slow-going at times, but gritty and real enough that you want to stay with it.
The Manitou (Dir. William Girdler, 1978)
Susan Strasberg (Psych-Out) has the fetus of a 400-year old Native American demon growing on her back. Doctors are flummoxed and so is her ex-boyfriend, phony psychic Tony Curtis. Only new-fangled medicine man, Michael Ansara (Day of the Animals, Dear Dead Delilah), can help. Completely enjoyable trash from the always enjoyably trashy Girdler (Grizzly, Asylum of Satan, Abby). –Reviews by Charles Lieurance
JERRY TEEL
Musician/Voodoo Crankshaft for Boss Hog/Honeymoon Killers/The Chrome Cranks/Knoxville Girls/Jerry Teel & The Big City Stompers…
Jerry Teel has splattered more dixie-fried guitar & bass hoodoo across more outsider underground recordings than almost anyone. He stands in a rarefied league with James Luther Dickinson, Alex Chilton, Tav Falco, Jon Spencer, The Cramps, Ross Johnson, Kid Congo Powers, The Gun Club & Don Howland. If it’s raw, unreconstructed & primal as fuck, Jerry Teel has probably had a hand in it. Dig.
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If I had known that this was more than a 3-hour tour, I would have smuggled a couple more DVDs in my lifejacket, but if I only have 5…
1. The Night of the Iguana (John Huston, 1964)
With Tennessee Williams as the writer & John Huston as the director, of course this is brilliant as well as beautiful. This film asks all the basic questions of existence and is an excellent choice for a desert island — very tropical with palm trees and all. It’s like lying in a hammock, reading a good book & drinking a rum coco.
2. Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)
As a kid growing up in a small town in the South, this is one that made me want to move to New York. It’s also one that could make me happy to be warm on a desert island. Loneliness is the theme – easy to relate... 3. The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
Another film that starts in a small town in the South and stays there. Loneliness is the main theme. Hank Williams is on the radio, just like when I was growin’ up – very reflective. I met Clu Gulager once. It was a thrill.
This one also made me want to move to NYC, live in the Dakota & worship Satan. I saw Ruth Gordon on the street once, 5th Avenue & 59th Street. Another thrill of my life. 5. Performance (Nicholas Roeg/Donald Cammell, 1970)
Sex, drugs, gangsters & rock’n'roll in 60s London, with Mick Jagger & Anita Pallenberg. Great soundtrack. Enough to make me want to send up the smoke signals for a record player & a copy of Exile on Main Street.
Guitarist, Vocalist & Songwriter Brimstone Howl
Brimstone Howl are the ragged, manger-raised progeny of The Gun Club, The Oblivians & bluesmen on murderous benders from time immemorial. Every bone-rattling Nebraska country road, coon dog yelp & boozy midnight hunch towards home is engraved into their sound like black ice on a serpent’s tongue. After a deluge of great press, the Howl are currently touring Europe, where NME called them “Beatles-headed psych-nerds with a taste for razor sharp snake-rock,” (pretty hard to know where to place the hyphens in that sentence…) & MAGNET magazine called their new CD, Guts of Steel (Alive Records), an “unholy hot-wiring of The Sonics, The Damned & The Blues Explosion.” Oh, and Ziegler’s also one helluva writer…
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1. The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)
Not much of an explanation needed here. Mostly subtle hints at the worst kind of danger and then unassailable waves of black horror. And I do mean the worst kind of danger, so it’s good that it would be handled somewhat delicately, (delicately enough), before the green vomit and congress of the crucifix occurs. The flash of the face on stove, the display of total Catholic stoicism in the face of the enemy of mankind… But maybe it wouldn’t be that fun to watch alone over and over again on a desert island. The next would, I think. 2. RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)
Paul Verhoeven’s hilarious vision of a future where Detroit (a halo of wealth surrounding a flush hole of poverty) topples on the verge of economic breakdown, necessitating a new set of police SOP’s. He even goes so far as to say that the mayor, ridiculously, might be implicated in all of the brutish miscarriages of public trust. The only thing separating this movie from reality is robots, faces melting from toxic waste burns, and stop-action sequences of robot police malfunctioning. Probably, if not already, prophetic in a sad-but-not-remarkable way. But that’s not why I’d take it to the island. I like the dialogue. 3. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer, 1970)
Written by Roger Ebert and directed by Russ Meyer. It’s a cautionary tale, they say, but mostly a funny diatribe against false-prophet party favorers like Z-man. And it also has a lot of great songs written for the band, which are maybe the most sincere elements of the film. Really, the music is beautiful and doesn’t laugh at itself at all, unless with tears streaming down its face at the same time. This film maybe shouldn’t occupy any list of top 5 movies on a desert island, and would be mostly worthless after 2 or 3 viewings. 4. Apocalypto (Mel Gibson, 2006)
For sure, this movie would have received much higher acclaim had it not been for the director’s unfortunate tiff with police. I think this movie is paced perfectly, with a near perfect balance of action. And nothing, not the subtitles or the heavy-handed foreshadowing and symbolism, can really take away from the total effect. Spear-chucking, head rolling, face eating, rape, murder, celebratory human sacrifice. It’s bizarre enough that I think you can forgive the obvious lesson to be learned from the small armada of conquistadors’ boats pulling to shore in the final scenes. 5. The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978)
Another comedy here. This is a list about movies and presumably their directors, but it’d be hard not to trace some of the great discomfort I felt watching this movie to the same felt at watching Rosemary’s Baby, partially to the credit of the author of both novels, Ira Levin. (It comes from the word first). In this one about Hitler cloning, the young American Hitler clone is about as ready for the shoes that his cloner has prepared for him as Dolores Haze is to fulfill Humbert Humbert’s vision of love. Basically, manipulative American brats who just aren’t ready for any adult’s plan for transcendental love or biblical evil, in spite of their predilection at a young age for sex and violence, depending on which we’re talking about. Of course that’s not all it’s about. The British Hitler has his faults as well.
JOHN RATLIFF
Austin Improv Comedian – The Smoking Arm/Ratliff & Jackson Keyboard Player – The Diamond Smugglers Freelance Writer – Esquire, SPIN, Blender ________________________________________
His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)
Yeah, yeah, yeah: the toast scene in the diner. I love that scene too, but now I wish it had wound up on the cutting-room floor instead of reducing the entirety of Five Easy Pieces to a clip shoehorned between “You can’t handle the truth!” and “Here’s Johnny!” in Jack Nicholson montages. What you can’t tell from that snippet is that in this movie he was actually acting, instead of whatever it is he does these days. Screenwriter Carole Eastman’s smart, dark meditation on self-imposed alienation refuses to tell you how to feel about the complex characters — though for some reason she does give them all hilarious names. (For starters: Rayette Dipesto, Catherine Van Oost, Partita Dupea, Palm Apodaca, Samia Glavia.) Citizen Ruth (Alexander Payne, 1996) IMHO, a perfect political satire, anchored by a perfect performance. (Ohmigod, I am so in love with Laura Dern I could plotz, mostly because of this movie.) Both sides of the abortion debate are lovingly, rigorously reduced to smoking junk piece by piece, but thanks to a brilliant cast almost nobody comes off as an easy caricature. Like all great satire, CR gradually escalates a real-world scenario to a completely illogical place, but the heightening always makes perfect sense in context. Also, some interesting parallels to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, but I don’t want to spoil it for you. (Confidential to LD: Ben Harper? REALLY? You’re killing me, just killing me.) Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998)
1. Best film version of an Elmore Leonard novel. (Okay, maybe a tie with Jackie Brown.) The Princess Bride by William Goldman I know this is supposed to be a list of movies, but I feel like this is a good place to say something that needs to be said: if you love the movie The Princess Bride, you REALLY NEED TO READ THE BOOK. I’m not knocking the movie, I’m just saying, the book completely blows it out of the water. You get back story for the Turk and Inigo and the Prince, plus it’s a book within a book where William Goldman makes himself a character, except that you think he’s not . . . it’s fantastic. I used to read this book aloud to my girlfriends and then I found out that Bill Hicks used to do the same thing to his girlfriends and if Bill Hicks and me combined are not enough reason to make you want to read this book then I don’t know what. Also, just read more books in general. Thank you. |
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Say what you will about the motivations of the matador, but this guy is actually risking his life for his beloved game and fans. At one point in the film, Fandila is gored in the side. Do medics instantly run out of with a stretcher? Hell, no. Fandila walks himself out of the arena, receives surgery in which he denies proffered anesthetic, and forty five minutes later returns and finishes off the bull. 
