Most people have probably never heard of Kent MacKenzie's historically and culturally essential film The Exiles (1961). Some clips of it surfaced in Thom Andersen's exceptional 2004 cine-essay Los Angeles Plays Itself—about the The City of Angels as depicted in movies—but unfortunately, most people have never heard of that film either. Andersen included it prominently because it managed to find vivid corners of the city that didn't actually look like set dressing. Now, thanks to Milestone Films (who also gave us the 2007 re-release and 2008 DVD of Charles Burnett's extraordinary Killer of Sheep), The Exiles has been released uncut on an outstanding two-disc set—presented by Burnett himself.

Continue reading "The Exiles" »

Posted by craigp at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): **½

Don't you hate it when your parents go away for the weekend and you accidentally open up a portal to hell in the backyard? But it's always good when your best friend has a special heavy metal album (imported from Europe, of course), complete with liner notes filled with helpful information and spells. And when all else fails, it's good to have a model rocket to launch at the bad guys.

If only The Gate knew how silly it really is, but as directed by Tibor Takács, it plows straight through its ridiculous story and dialogue as if it were an "After School Special." It seems vaguely interested in following in the footsteps of hits like Poltergeist (1982) and Gremlins (1984) -- focusing on kids and families rather than sexually exploratory teens -- but instead it comes across as unsatisfyingly tame. The movie's most interesting character, the older sister "Al" (Christa Denton), must eventually decide between the love of her pesky younger brother or the teenage hunk she wants to make out with, but the movie fumbles this potentially emotional situation.

Continue reading "The Gate" »

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Continue reading "Careful (Remastered and Repressed)" »

Posted by craigp at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (4 mosche di velluto grigio)
Directed by Dario Argento
1972, 102 minutes, In Italian (no subtitles) or English dubbed
Maya Entertainment

When Dario Argento's ultra-nutty horror spectacle Mother of Tears was released last year, I was far from alone in believing it to be the first watchable film of the Italian maestro's in two decades, which perhaps isn't the grandest of compliments if you've seen what came before. On the other end of his career, however, before hitting his zenith (everything from 1975's Deep Red through 1987's Opera), even his hokier-plotted giallos like Four Flies on Grey Velvet (his third feature and last leg in the so-called "animal trilogy," following The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat O' Nine Tails) bare more suspense, panache and memorable sequences than most of what passes for modern American horror and crime thrillers. Never before available as a legitimate home video release in any format until today, the uncut, vividly photographed Four Flies on Grey Velvet deserves a new cult following in your living room, the more friends and booze the merrier. Don't worry about twisting the arms of the squeamish either, as the bloody mayhem is so implicit that when originally released theatrically by Paramount, the film only carried a PG-rating.

Continue reading "Four Flies on Grey Velvet" »

Posted by craigp at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****½

One of the most famous unknown films of all time finally comes out of the shadows of bootleggery and gets the Criterion treatment. Samuel Fuller's White Dog, a story about the re-programming of a dog that's been trained to attack black people, was considered such volatile subject matter in 1982 that the NAACP threatened boycotts while the film was still shooting. Paramount Studios eventually cowed and shelved the film entirely which only served to generate a long-lasting ignominy against Fuller. Eventually the director was forced to relocate to France where at the very least, people actually watch movies before labeling a film-maker as a virulent racist. Even then he was only able to make one more film, the extraordinarily bitter Street of No Return, about a great opera singer who has his throat cut out by powerful mobsters.

White Dog's genesis was nearly as seedy and tortured as its (to date) shelf life. Adapted from "Chien Blanc", Romain Gary's semi-autobiographical novel about he and his wife actress Jean Seberg's adoption of a stray dog that they later discovered had been trained to attack black people. Seberg became committed to curing the dog and Gary used the incident, as well as his wife's former involvement with the Black Panther movement, as a jumping off point to examine the need to quash bigotry. The story went through the usual studio channels (at one point set to be directed by Arthur Penn), eventually being assigned to Roman Polanski who had to abandon the project after fleeing criminal charges for sex with a minor. It was screenwriter Curtis Hanson (who would go on to direct Wonder Boys, L.A. Confidential, 8 Mile) who suggested the studio brass consider the legendary B-movie director Samuel Fuller, who'd had a minor hit with his World War II film The Big Red One. With a writers' strike looming, Paramount was confident Fuller could get a script in working shape and complete the film on time and on budget.

Continue reading "White Dog" »

Posted by craigp at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Reviewer: Jeffrey Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***

The 35 year-old filmmaker Harmony Korine (Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy) co-wrote his long-awaited third feature film, Mister Lonely with his brother Avi, cast his wife Rachel in one of the lead roles and dedicated the film to his late grandmother. And so it goes that Mister Lonely is about a kind of family. Diego Luna plays a Michael Jackson impersonator, hereafter known as Michael. He works the streets of Paris, copying Michael's famous dance moves and wearing Michael's strange clothing (black fedora, glittery marching band shirts, high-water pants, etc.). He never sings, but the film's four segments are named after Jackson songs. Michael meets Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton), who invites him to stay at a kind of commune for celebrity impersonators. Her husband Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant) and their daughter Shirley Temple (Esme Creed-Miles) also live there. The rest of the "family" includes Buckwheat, of "The Little Rascals" fame (Michael-Joel Stuart), Sammy Davis Jr. (Jason Pennycooke), James Dean (Joseph Morgan), Abraham Lincoln (Richard Strange), Little Red Riding Hood (Rachel Korine), Madonna (Melita Morgan), The Pope (veteran British actor James Fox), Queen Elizabeth (Anita Pallenberg) and the Three Stooges: Moe (Daniel Rovai), Larry (Mal Whiteley) and Curly (Nigel Cooper). (Incidentally, Fox and Pallenberg are reunited for the first time since Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's 1970 film Performance, no doubt on purpose.) Lincoln uses the "F" word a lot, Buckwheat is obsessed with chickens and the Pope doesn't like to bathe.

Continue reading "Mister Lonely" »

Posted by craigp at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Ratings (out of 5): ****

The publication of Richard Adams' Watership Down in 1972 created a literary furor. An immediate and enormous best-seller in Britain and the U.S. (and, I imagine, everywhere else it was published), the novel was one of those rare publishing anomalies that captures the imagination of just about everybody: a 429-page children's book suited equally, if not better, to adults, with glossary, map (complete with references) and peppered throughout with quotes from everyone from Shakespeare to Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy and the Duke of Wellington. The story is full of the things that we look for in good, gripping novels -- excitement, adventure, suspense, love, death, joy, sacrifice and commitment, with the capper of being highly intelligent and beautifully written. The heroes? A group of rabbits that must relocate its warren.

At the close of my initial reading, the book left me in a profound state (not to mention a puddle of tears), feeling I had experienced something quite special. Upon learning that the film adaptation was to be animated, I was saddened. How could this do justice to the book? Movie technology of the time (1978) had not reached the heights of Babe, with that film’s lifelike talking animals, so we had to settle for what we could get. What we got, in Martin Rosen's Watership Down, was a remarkably able, though telescoped tale (those 429 pages were now 92 minutes), made with class, talent and respect for Adams' accomplishment.

Continue reading "Watership Down (Deluxe Edition): The Bunnies Are Back!" »

Posted by craigp at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5):
Disc (Season) One: ****½
Disc (Season) Two: ****
Bonus Disc: ***½

After several years of hearing about a wonderfully quirky British show called Spaced, and then hearing still more about it when its creators went on to make the highly regarded genre-busting film comedies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and then finally seeing some bits of said show on a bootleg DVD someone had sent me, made from the fairly barebones UK region 2 release, now at long last comes a proper US release of the entire series. Fans of those films should rejoice, for herein is the germination of everything director Edgar Wright and company would subsequently produce, and yet may never quite top.

For those many of us who are already familiar with how sharply funny Simon Pegg and his frequent compadre Nick Frost can be, it is Jessica Stevenson (who now uses her married name, Hynes) who might be the real revelation to Americans here. In the UK she's quite well known as a comic performer on stage and in TV (and has been a collaborator with Pegg for some time), but it's a delight to see her here at her likable best, a semi-spastic but earnest wonder, the perfect foil for Pegg's manchildish character. The show centers around Pegg's Tim and Stevenson's Daisy, two strangers who meet when apartment hunting and decide to make a go of searching for a flat together. They discover it's easier to find a place they love if they pretend to be a married couple. And if that sounds like the set-up to a terrible American sitcom, it very well might, but in Spaced it is the perfect set up for Wright, Pegg and Stevenson's loopy humor and (cornucopia) of loopy characterizations -- which generously lends itself all the way down to a rich supporting cast.

Continue reading "Spaced" »

Posted by craigp at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): *****

Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr has always been notorious for his long, slow, and exceedingly bleak cinematic explorations of life in the former Soviet bloc. But the mere two hours and twenty five minutes that one of his most celebrated films, Werckmeister Harmonies (made six years earlier, in 2000), takes for its poetically bizarre visual symbolisms to unfold, are nothing compared to Sátántángo.

With a total running time of seven hours and fifteen minutes, Sátántángo ceremoniously deserves to be called "epic." Nonetheless, as skeptical as the film's duration may make a viewer, Tarr's rendering of the last days of a collective farm during the end of communist-era Hungary is so engaging and so breathtakingly beautiful that one barely notices the hours go by.

Continue reading "Satantango" »

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Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****½

Paul Schrader -- having internalized the criticism he faced after Taxi Driver of pouring his obsession with ritualistic suicide into an illiterate, mentally ill Vietnam veteran -- explores the real life (and gruesome death) of one of Japan's most revered literary figures, Yukio Mishima. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters exists in Schrader's eclectic directorial body of work squarely between the Cat People re-make and the odd Joan Jett/Michael J. Fox vehicle Light of Day. And even though he would go on to direct the widely commended Affliction and the intriguing Auto Focus, Schrader has always maintained (rightfully so) that Mishima was his greatest work.

The film follows the traditional trajectory of a biopic: his dysfunctional upbringing, romantic endeavors, romantic failures, political radicalization and self-discovery but the wikipedia-approach is not the main objective. Schrader (always more respected as a screenwriter than director, then and now) understands that a writer's work and fantasy life hold the key to understanding the choices they make in the terrestrial realm.

Continue reading "Mishima" »

Posted by craigp at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***

Jean-Luc Godard's tenth film Pierrot Le Fou, one of the last he made before going full-tilt Marxist, has been restored and reissued in the extraordinary fashion we've all come to know and respect from Criterion. The Technicolor/Cinemascope print has been cleaned up from sad, past versions and a second disc of supplemental materials offers new insights into the film's genesis, production and lasting impact.

After attending a painfully buji party where the men only talk about cars and the women only talk about perfumes, Pierrot (Jean-Paul Belmondo) decides he's had enough of his wife, children and other middle class trappings. He runs off with Marianne (Anna Karina) his children's babysitter, with whom he had an affair years prior. They hit the road, fleeing a group of gangsters her brother had been involved with, take up in abandoned mansions by the riviera, begging for money from tourists and murdering anyone who gets in their way. Eventually romantic idealism gives way to monotonous expectation and obligation and Pierrot and Marianne break up, get back together, declare their love and hate for each other and eventually die.

Continue reading "Pierrot Le Fou" »

Posted by craigp at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****½

In 1968, director Lindsay Anderson and star Malcolm McDowell teamed up for If..., about an old, rigid English boys school attempting to mold young minds with strict control, obedience and punishment. The film had moments of absurd comedy and of drama, moments of stark realism and of blatant non-realism. Flipping back and forth from black-and-white to color footage doesn't make it any easier to pinpoint. But when it opened in that turbulent year, it tapped directly into the mood of the time and became a phenomenon, a cultural landmark. McDowell played Mick Travis, a free spirit who slowly realizes that he can't quite fit in. In the end, he and his cohorts attempt to take over the school with firearms. McDowell became a star in his first movie role, with his James Dean-type physicality, fearless and entrancing. If his confident stride didn't hypnotize you, his gleaming dagger-sharp eyes will. (Just check out his memorable entrance, swathed in black with a black hat and scarf around his face.)

After a stop to play the lead role in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), McDowell approached Anderson about working together again. Anderson told him that good scripts don't grow on trees and that he needed to write his own, so McDowell concocted a yarn out of his own life story (even though he was only thirty). The screenwriter David Sherwin wrote the final script, and O Lucky Man! (1973) was born. It's as audacious as anything made in the 1970s, running three hours without much of a plot; it divided audiences to the same degree that If... united them.

Continue reading "O Lucky Man!" »

Posted by craigp at 1:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): ****

L' Age D'Or (1930) marks not only Luis Buñuel's feature debut, but also the ill-fated ending of a rather unusual, yet extremely creative, collaboration. Having enjoyed a successful cooperation while making their much talked about short Un Chien Andalou (1928), Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, two of the most well respected surrealist artists of the era, attempted to replicate their experience. Sadly, well before L'Age was completed their friendship was fractured for good.

Supposedly, when the film opened for the first time in Paris it started a riot, which eventually led to it being banned by the French government. Even though L'Age makes little in the way of sense, at least in the linear, plot driven and conventional way that mainstream movies do, one can easily understand why it inspired such strong reactions.

Continue reading "L'Age D'Or" »

Posted by craigp at 6:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Starstruck was renowned Australian director Gillian Armstrong's second feature. After making a name for herself with My Brilliant Career (1979), a romantic period drama which garnered a number of awards and critical acclaim, Armstrong apparently wanted to get involved in a completely different project to prove herself to be a versatile filmmaker. And that she did.

Made in 1982 in Sydney, Australia, Starstruck is a campy and energetic teen musical that delightfully captures a time when that country's new wave music scene was erupting. Featuring a wonderfully silly soundtrack with rock and punkish inclinations by pop band The Swingers (supposedly they were selected over INXS and Men at Work who were also interested in writing music for the film), the movie follows Jackie (Jo Kennedy) and her cousin Angus (Ross O'Donovan) as they try to sing and dance their way out of their seemingly mundane lives into a successful music career. Due to certain plots twists, which feel more as extra excuses to break out into frantic dancing than points advancing the story, things don't go exactly as planned for the two cousins, but fear not; in the end valuable lessons are learned and everybody is happy.

Continue reading "Starstruck" »

Posted by craigp at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reviewer: Monica Peck
Rating (out of 5): ***½

This 22 minute animated short based on Mike Mignola's award winning comic book has quickly ascended the 'steampunk' cult classic ladder. Ripe with 19th century banter, mystical artifacts, and technological anachronyms, The Amazing Screw-On Head takes viewers back, then sideways, to a time when the world was simpler, and yet, more bizarre.

It's no wonder that Mignola of Hellboy fame, won another Eisner Award (the "Oscars" of the comic book industry) in 2003 for The Amazing Screw-On Head under Best Humor Publication. And this is a rare brand of humor - surrealist, ironic, tongue so deep in cheek it hurts - coupled with campy plot-lines: a missing manuscript, a vile zombie villain, and a taste of apocalyptic horror. A wealth of talented comic performers add to the fun, including Molly Shannon, Patton Oswalt and Paul Giamatti. Built as a television pilot, the film stands very well on its own--perhaps too well for producers to see a series, hence the lack of follow-up from SciFi/Pulse. Producers Bryan Fuller and Jason Netter, with director Chris Prynoski and Mignola as art director, successfully matched the look and feel of the comic, much to the satisfaction of fans. In fact, the loudest complaint seems to be that television executives dropped the series. Still, there hasn't been an official word on the subject, so perhaps we can continue to hope for another installment.

Posted by craigp at 4:42 PM | Permalink

Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): **½

The Man With the Screaming Brain marks B-Movie sensation Bruce Campbell's first attempt at filmmaking (the actor had previously directed several Hercules and Xena episodes but never a feature film), and if it's perhaps not the actor's most triumphant achievement, at least he finally realized a project that, along with producer and pal David M. Goodman, he had been struggling to finance for a little over two decades.

For some of Campbell's fans, Man might be something of a disappointment. This quite wacky film fails to stand up to the camp magnificence of the Evil Dead series, for which the actor is beloved. But the hard-to-wrap-one's-mind-around plot and the confusing, disturbing, and mind-boggling implications it makes, should not be taken lightly. Campbell plays William Cole, a pharmaceutical company CEO who travels all the way to Bulgaria in order to make an investment in an unfinished subway project that will give him a major tax break. He drags his Jackie O-look-alike wife (Antoinette Byron) along with him, thinking that the trip might refresh their dying marriage. Little does he know that they'll be joined by their former-KGB-agent taxi driver Yegor (Vladimir Kolev) and a gypsy woman named Tatoya (Tamara Gorski), to form an unruly quartet.

The overly complex story of how and when it all happens makes it hard to connect with. Suffice it to say that thanks to cuckoo Professor Dr. Ivan Ivanoff (Stacy Keach) and his recent transplant surgery breakthrough, Cole and Yegor, and Jackie and Tatoya, come to literally share the same body and brain respectively. A comment on the possibility of a peaceful co-existence between capitalism and communism? A suggestion that getting married means taming one's wild side? Or perhaps it's all simply an excuse to give Bruce Campbell an opportunity for physical acting.

Posted by craigp at 5:29 PM | Permalink

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): *½; add half a star if you’re a diehard Pacino fan

Shortly before and during the time that William Friedkin was shooting Cruising, the protests from the gay movement here in New York City struck me as untimely. The movie wasn't yet made: Didn't this go against the very idea of freedom of expression? I've now seen the film three times: upon its release, later on videotape and now on DVD in its much-improved, digitally re-mastered version. Protests or no, it stinks.

Seen today, the film appears almost to have been made by a crew of beginners--which is hardly the case, given the resumes of Friedkin (who acted as both director and writer/adaptor of the Gerald Walker novel on which the film is based) and his crew. From the second scene onwards, the heavily expository dialog, coupled with some terrible acting, simply embarrasses. As the film proceeds, it becomes clear that there is little "plot" per se, almost no sense of development, and the dialog remains dead--flat, expositional, and devoid of the quirks of speech that might make it seem real. The acting is mostly on the level of bad "method" (monochromatic, dreary) and this includes, I'm afraid, the lead performance of Al Pacino. When you are given no interesting dialog to work with, acting "real" can bore the pants off the average viewer.

The look of the film is bleak, seedy and mostly devoid of color--except in the apartment of the Pacino character's girlfriend Nancy (played by Karen Allen in what may be the most thankless role of her career), about whom we never learn a thing. Oddly enough, Allen is practically the only female in the film. I don't recall another movie set in a NYC so totally devoid of women. Gays actually do have female friends, but you wouldn’t glean that fact from this movie. It's all guys, all the time, mostly gays and cops, and most of these sick and unhappy. Now, I don't mind watching a movie that's dark and bleak, but I would like to be able to find some sense and meaning to it. In scene after scene, Cruising sports an air of unreality that never lifts. Its victims are characterless, the villain is essentially a cipher with but a single characteristic (the daddy issue), and the "hero"--despite his inordinate amount of screen time--is also very nearly character-free.

Continue reading "Cruising: Third Time Out and Still Not the Charm" »

Posted by craigp at 1:19 PM | Permalink

Reviewer: Walt Opie
Rating (out of 5): ***

According to none other than acclaimed author Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff) in Tom Thurman's documentary Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride: Hunter S. Thompson on Film, the gonzo journalist was one of the greatest comic writers of our time. It turns out that much of Hollywood made pilgrimages to visit Thompson at his home of many years in Woody Creek, Colorado, and many are interviewed in this engaging film, including John Cusack, Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn, Gary Busey, Ed Bradley, Bill Murray and Johnny Depp (who lived in his basement for a while and described himself as a partner in crime with Thompson after they initially bonded over their mutual hometown of Louisville, Kentucky). "If you let Thompson into your psyche, he has this way of slipping in and out from time to time and continuing to inhabit you for the rest of your life." This was the cautionary advice Murray gave Depp over the phone just before Depp played a character based on Thompson (Raoul Duke) in the 1998 film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Murray knew all too well, having already portrayed Thompson himself in the underrated 1980 cult movie Where the Buffalo Roam (which co-starred Peter Boyle and Bruno Kirby). Thompson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in February of 2005, and his ashes have since been shot out of a large cannon shaped like a two-thumbed fist (paid for by Depp and envisioned by Thompson) on the property of his Owl Farm in Woody Creek. This film (originally produced for the Starz channel) has been made as a sort of love note back to Thompson, with plenty of rarely seen, candid footage of the wily man himself, often in his kitchen telling stories or elsewhere in private settings, although his actual words are sometimes garbled and nearly indiscernible. There is likewise a rather incomprehensible narration by none other than raspy, ravaged-sounding Nick Nolte.

Continue reading "Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride: Hunter S. Thompson on Film" »

Posted by craigp at 3:59 PM | Permalink

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

Directed in 1982 by then NYU film student Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan, Sex and the City), Smithereens is an inverse love story about a group of borderline homeless, fame-seekers in the wake of a punk rock scene that has just reached its high watermark. Wearing its French New Wave and Fellini influences on its sleeve, Smithereens was the first American film to be included in the Palme d'Or competition at the Cannes film festival.

Continue reading "Smithereens: Desperately seeking Seidelman" »

Posted by craigp at 1:21 PM | Permalink

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ****

The American perception of the culture of Japan and Japanese film sometimes presents the people of that island nation as somewhat inscrutable, mystical folk - as wondrously humanistic as Ozu's films are, his protagonists can feel as metaphorically far away from contemporary American life as Japan literally is. The Japanese people that fill the films of Shohei Imamura, however, are fully human, not beholden to the ancient codes of their forefathers, working their topknots and holding intricately beautiful tea ceremonies but rather as people that scrape by and curse their parents, eat and work, kill and screw.

Based on a true story of Akira Nishiguchi (named Iwao Enokizu in the movie), a sociopathic killer who went on a 78-day crime/killing spree in 1964, Vengeance Is Mine is a bracing view of Imamura's Japan. The film itself follows a novelistic structure, opening with Enokizu's capture by the police, and then flashing back to give the viewer chapters in his life. As we then follow Enokizu (Ken Ogata) through his troubled youth, the film is vibrantly prurient, foul, melodramatic and occasionally even funny.

Continue reading "Vengeance Is Mine" »

Posted by craigp at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Cevin D. Soling's mini-budget satire The War on the War on Drugs is already five years old, yet it is surprising how little the movie appears to have dated. But then, with nutty US government drug policy remaining the same--or worse--from year to year, decade to decade, this movie will probably seem hilarious eons from now. Often silly and almost always good-natured (despite the dark subject matter), Soling's parodies, musings, imaginings and comparisons are apt, thoughtful, amusing, alternately inspired and clunky, and occasionally gut-busting fun. Brevity is among his virtues, as well, so few scenes last longer than necessary. Toward the end, one does begin to sense that the filmmaker has begun to exhaust his supply of targets and/or ammunition. But all in all it's amusing, and, hey, a little experimenting never hurt anyone.

Posted by craigp at 4:35 PM | Permalink

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

Some movies may be arty, different and interesting The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes immediately comes to mind) but not be all that enjoyable overall. Tears Of The Black Tiger manages the arty/different/interesting part, while providing enormous fun in the process. Much of this, I suspect, may be due to how little knowledge many of us western film buffs possess regarding the traditions of Thailand, its culture and film history. We may have seen some of the oddities of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady), the martial-artsy Ong-Bak, a genre-jumping Beautiful Boxer or a gorgeous epic like Suriyothai (the Thai movies I can immediately bring to mind), and although the Hong Kong-born Pang brothers often film in Thailand and clearly have an appreciation of that country, this is not quite the same thing as being Thai. Consequently, when we see something as bizarre, colorful, and all-over-the-place as writer/director Wisit Sasanatieng's Tears, the experience probably approximates how viewing one’s first Bollywood extravaganza might have seemed at the time.

Continue reading "Tears of the Black Tiger: Thai yai-yai!" »

Posted by craigp at 2:34 PM | Permalink

GreenCine is giving away copies of the new-to-DVD film Apartment Zero to five lucky winners of our new trivia contest. The 1988 black comedy/erotic thriller, directed by Argentinian Martin Donovan (no, not that one), is set in Buenos Aires and centers around two disturbed roommates (played by Brit Colin Firth and Canadian Hart Bochner). "Creepy and original," wrote Christopher Null on Filmcritic.com. "Donovan's direction recalls Polanski and his and [David] Koepp's script exudes Hitchcock. A better combo I couldn't give you."

To be eligible for the prize, send an email with the correct answer to contest@greencine.com, including your name, email address and, if you're a GreenCine member, your username in the email, and "Apartment Zero" in the subject header. Winners will be selected at random from all correct entries. The deadline is Friday, February 23, at 12PM PST. Winners will be notified by e-mail and announced in future editions of the GreenCine Dispatch newsletter, and right here on this space.

The Question: What epic 80s mini-series did Hart Bochner star in?

Posted by craigp at 5:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You know him as that Texan who has long been a champion of drive-in theaters and B-movies, of "aardvarking," fu, counter of breasts. But he's also author of several fine film books, co-publisher of a renowned religious satire magazine, actor, cable TV host and, now, head of programming at a new horror network. We've got some short attention span interview fu working and Joe Bob says check it out. Interview with Joe Bob Briggs >>

Posted by craigp at 1:24 PM | Permalink

GreenCine has a lot to be thankful for this year, but in our film geeky way we are feeling especially thankful about the home video release of a bunch of great films that had formerly been missing in action on DVD. We've compiled some of our picks for the best films to finally see a DVD release in 2006.

Top 10 Formerly MIA DVDs of 2006 >>

Posted by craigp at 9:24 AM | Permalink

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***½

At last - a DVD release of the movie young, feminist film-makers spent their formative years trading bootleg VHS copies of: Born in Flames. Made in 1983 and touted as "feminist science fiction, Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames is set in the grimy streets of a pre-Giulliani NYC but ten years after a peaceful social revolution that had ostensibly made all Americans equal. However, women are still facing a disproportionate level of violence that the police and local government don't acknowledge ("after all, ladies, you already had your revolution!")

Continue reading "Born In Flames" »

Posted by craigp at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reviewer:Jonathan Marlow
Rating (out of 5): ***½

"Nine killed her, nine will die!"

Robert Fuest is one of the greatest directors you've never heard of. From his days as helmsman for a handful of episodes on the ground-breaking television show The Avengers, on to his brief attempt at Eurotrash with the fabulous And Soon the Darkness and even until his last feature, the surprisingly explicit Aphrodite, the man was an exceptionally crafty filmmaker. Over a two-year period (1971-2), Fuest released among the most original pair of horror pictures ever made, both starring the legendary Vincent Price as Anton Phibes: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (amazingly, Price's 100th movie appearance), and the less successful Dr. Phibes Rises Again. In the original, organist Anton uses the ten plagues of Egypt (as described in Exodus) to kill the nine doctors responsible for his wife's demise. With a supporting cast of Joseph Cotten, Terry-Thomas, the stunning Virginia North and an array of talented character actors, the first Phibes is a masterpiece. The sequel, continuing in the black-humor vein, still has the systematic death element (even if it isn't worked into the plot quite as cleverly), still has significant guest stars (Robert Quarry, Peter Cushing, Terry-Thomas again -- didn't we kill him off in the first one?) but lacks the spark of the original. Yet despite the fact that it feels rushed into production to capitalize on the success of the first film, the sequel is terrifically entertaining. When Price died in 1993, it temporarily killed my dream of making a third Phibes film. "Temporarily" because, as you'll note when you watch these films, Vincent's character can be replaced -- he has no face. Someday, someday...

Posted by craigp at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Criterion's edition of Fiend Without a Face is a wonderful transfer of an oft-neglected little creeper. Whereas the previous DVD edition looked no better than what you would have seen on late night television twenty years ago, the new anamorphic edition was put through the usual Criterion care and feeding to look as sharp as it likely ever has. There is also some truly outstanding audio commentary with producer Richard Gordon and expert horror film writer Tom Weaver that isn't just about the film itself but also about producing films in the 1950s. It will make you want to watch the whole thing all over again.

The story: People in a small town seem to be losing their minds - literally! Could radiation, and telepathy, be involved? It isn't as silly as it sounds (okay, it's a little silly). Like the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, this film came at the height of Cold War paranoia and could be interpreted in several ways - some of them silly. But cinematically it has its champions, too; many critics, and film buffs, claim that Fiend Without a Face was a direct influence on such low-budget horror classics as Night of the Living Dead and some of John Carpenter's films. Given the time the film was made, it's particularly surprising how relatively gory the film is in spots - this too, was surely an influence on Romero and others. Makes one wonder if there was a disclaimer provided with the film upon original release - "Warning! This film contains crawling brains being splattered!" But fear not (or perhaps, fear yes!) for this classic cult film, ignoring its clunky science, has surprisingly good effects and is full of scares - and, okay, a few unintentional chuckles, too. Either way, it's the perfect movie for a Halloween treat.

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Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Keane stars Damian Lewis, most famous here previously for his portrayal of the earnest American captain in the WWII series Band of Brothers (he's actually British). Lewis gives an absolutely brilliant, wrenching performance as a man desperately searching for his missing daughter - or does she exist at all? Director Lodge Kerrigan, who also explored madness in his first feature, the memorable Clean, Shaven (just out on DVD from Criterion), and the filmmaker is in full command of his craft here, using a single camera for street-level, first person immediacy. And because of this, be forewarned: it's a challenge to at first stick with it through Keane's disturbed babblings while he wanders through New York. But as the film unfolds, and Keane befriends a similiarly down-and-out mother (played by The Wire's Amy Ryan) and daughter, it slyly works its way in surprisingly heartrending fashion, while never failing to keep things emotionally true. Cassavetes would be proud. Textbook stuff, in more ways than one.

Would make a good double-feature with the new doc Unknown White Male and especially, of course, Clean, Shaven.

Posted by craigp at 12:19 PM | Permalink

• The Omega Man (1971).
• Dead Alive (Brain Dead) (1992).
• Shaun of the Dead (2004).
• 28 Days Later (2002).
• Re-Animator (1985).
• The Serpent and the Rainbow (1987).
• Zombie/Zombi 2 (1979).
• Land of the Dead.
• Bio Zombie (2001).
• Junk (1999).
• Return of the Living Dead (1985).

Posted by craigp at 10:35 AM | Permalink

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***

When the president of a floundering Madison Avenue advertising agency keels over and dies on the conference table during a meeting, the board calls for a vote to designate a new president. Each of the men are so disappointed that the bylaws prohibit voting for themselves that they all abstain by voting for the only black man on the board. And this is how Putney Swope becomes the president of the advertising agency. He decides that since the company is already doomed he might as well go down in flames. "Rockin' the boat's a drag," he says, "Whatcha do is sink the boat!" He immediately fires all the white people, renames the agency "Truth and Soul, Inc.", and puts all the clients who make war toys and cigarettes on notice.

The satire Putney Swope is a bit less cutting than it undoubtedly was in the late sixties but the film's earnest weirdness rewards multiple viewings and perhaps demonstrates that LSD was not all bad. The television spots created by the new agency include: a psychedelic montage of topless girls jumping on a trampoline before deciding to have an orgy with a random passerby (to sell Lucky Airline travel, of course), a redneck beauty queen getting pied in the face with chicken pot pies, and a double amputee hocking life insurance by proclaiming "they charge an arm and a leg, but it's worth every penny!" And then there's director Robert Downey's decision to dub in all of Swope's dialogue with his own gravelley, white voice - a decision necessitated by the actor's inability to remember his lines and the low-budget shooting schedule - that now reads like a brilliant stylistic choice.

Continue reading "Putney Swope" »

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Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****½

I find it hard to believe that any movie buff out there has not yet seen Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, the late Russ Meyer's jaw-dropping non-sequel to the equally jaw-dropping (for different reasons) Valley of the Dolls, Mark Robson's "go" at the Jacqueline Susann novel. Erin Donovan's review captures the camp of the earlier film, but Meyer's movie (made three years later) is camp of a very different order. Although classy dames like Dorothy Kingsley and Helen Deutsch did the screenplay for the original Valley (hoping somehow to have their cake and eat it, too), the Beyond script comes from Roger Ebert (yes, him), and he wants to stuff the entire meal down our throat. This was his first attempt at a screenplay and, though by decade's close he'd written two more for Meyer, nothing - from him or anybody else, before or since - has ever come close to the entertaining lunacy of this wild film. Here is the world of 1970 in all its garish colors, costumes, hairstyles and expanding sexual habits plus "Gee, kids, let's put on a rock band," transgender, decapitation, lesbian allure, crossing the color barrier and finally - I kid you not - a denouement in which Ebert and Meyer try to take us all to church.

Continue reading "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" »

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Reviewer: Tamara Lees
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Like Night Moves and Cutter's Way, Cisco Pike is a low-key Seventies character study once derided as a failure but now in crying need of a new audience. It also boasts a superb film debut from Kris Kristofferson (who'd been glimpsed in the previous year's The Last Movie, if you want to pick nits), at the time better known as a musician. Here he plays the titular character, also a musician and former idol who has hit the skids. He ends up dealing drugs to make money, and is blackmailed by a crooked cop (played by Gene Hackman - in perfect form, both natural and poignant) to unload pounds of weed in less than three days or he's screwed. Harry Dean Stanton plays a long lost pal and bandmate of Pike's who is now, unfortunately, a total junkie; Stanton is mesmerizingly good here, although he wouldn't be fully appreciated until years later.

Kristofferson also contributes several terrific songs to the soundtrack, while director Bill Norton (also making his debut) does a nice job creating an appropriately boozy atmosphere. Like those other films mentioned above, Cisco Pike captures the aimlessness and disillusionment after the promise the spirt of the 60s once held for many. But while some aspects of the film may appear ready for a time capsule, it still holds up surprisingly well - and cynicism never goes out of style.

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Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***

Michele Soavi's demented Cemetery Man (the original, superior title is Dellamorte Dellamore, a play on the protagonist's name and a more appropriate summary of the film), one of the more underrated and artfully directed zombie films, has finally made its way to a stateside DVD release. The film is Italian horror but stars Brit Rupert Everett as a beleaguered cemetery keeper who has to deal with the dead's annoying habit of coming to life seven days after burial. All sorts of complications ensue, including the fact that his Igor-esque, sweet and slow-minded assistant falls in love with one of the dead; she, in turn, loses her head over him, too. A beautiful romantic interest for Everett, meanwhile, is provided by Anna Falchi (with at least one very erotic sex scene that ends, alas, in zombieus interruptus).

It's often gory and gross (dig that bus accident), and just as frequently funny, an odd hybrid of genres and tones, one part Night of the Living Dead and another part Delicatessen. While the sound, which probably was never great to begin with, is a bit tinny and muddied, it's certainly passable, and the print looks better than I remember seeing previously. For horror fans looking for a change of pace, Cemetery Man may be just the ticket. And remember: "You get into all sorts of trouble if you kill people if they're still alive." -- Craig Phillips

Posted by craigp at 7:57 PM | Permalink