Experiment · In · Pretension

We saw Syndicate Sadists about a week ago, so I can't recall any of the amusing dialogue snippets. However, I can't rid myself of the memories of Tomas Milian's kabuki stylings (seriously -- he acts like a dubbed mime, all facial tics and shrugs designed to convey that he is acting, damn it, even if someone else is doing the voice. Fuck, he's brilliant in this.). So, a review will out.
( Life is a hole... )

I've been going through and reading about the different, more obscure saints recently, in no particular order. (Except I had to check the list out for a St. Alexandra, for ego's sake.) Today is the feast day of Blessed Vilana, who has a particularly St Dymphna, the patron saint of the mentally ill, is my current favorite. She fled Ireland when her father went a little off with grief. He pursued her to Belgium to be his second wife, but, on her refusal, he beheaded her and a priest with whom she had escaped.

I am irrationally happy about Martin Scorsese finally winning an Oscar -- even if I knew it was coming as soon as they dragged Spielberg away from whatever Worthy Project he is working on and hauled Coppola and Lucas out of storage. Why not get Friedkin up there as well? I mean, he was in the audience already and he was another one of the directors that started off in the 70s... maybe there would have been a tussle for who would get the honor of putting a trophy in Scorsese's hands (at long fucking last)? A brou-ha-ha at the most tightly choreographed TV event of the year? Maybe it would all happen backstage, but I can imagine the ego-driven seething, which really makes any happy event feel, in my future's retrospective pondering, more textured.

And Helen Mirren! Woo hoo!

As it is, they should have replaced the big statue of the award with some representation of Scorsese talking about movies he likes, or something less overtly idolatrous than the bald, golden calf naked guy without genitals who we have gathered to celebrate. Who will be sacrificed next year to his brutal reign of self-aggrandizing?

I think I should go to sleep now before I get even more out of hand. Damn tasty Guinness...

This gem in the Italian giallo genre is, uniquely, set in Australia – Sydney, which we can tell by the numerous shots of the Opera House at different points during the movie – but features the same questionable dubbing as most of them. The Pyjama Girl Case starts, innocently enough, with children playing on the beach. A little girl, wandering along with her doll, telling stories out loud for the benefit of her little friend, sits down by a pile of abandoned cars in the sand. (Like some kind of random public art piece, that touch.) All the sudden, a bloody hand lands on her doll’s head. Screaming, ghoulishly burned face filling the screen. Enter the coppers and the credits.
( This is the stuff from which tangents are made… )

Street Corner
Because of Eve
Invisible Invaders
Journey to the Seventh Planet

Yep, one day I'll get back to actually writing something about the movies viewed -- by the end of the month, maybe?

Very quick rundown -- but, before I start, it was suggested by Dr Boyfriend that I make a note of the fabulous pimp funeral in Truck Turner. It is pretty amazing, really: all of the dead pimp's 'girls' are sitting around in very revealing black outfits and bling. One by one, other pimps come up to pay their respects and drop pills and cocaine on the casket as it is lowered. Yaphet Kotto strides up -- and here we get coffin-cam -- and spits on the casket, never releasing the girl on his arm. It is a whole lot of flamboyant 70s pimpwear and all the accoutrements of the lifestyle. KFed, those were pimps, not just some suburban slobs wearing monogrammed terry tracksuits they got from the PB Kids catalogue...
( Lots More movies, Part II of II )

Subtitled The Devil's Son-In-Law , Petey Wheatstraw makes Rudy Ray Moore's earlier work in Dolomite seem as serious as The Color Purple. I think it is closest to Rudy Ray Moore stand-up material in spirit -- it even starts out with one of his rap/spoken word/comic poems -- really playful, raunchy, and very much from the male perspective. All this and amazingly loud costumes, too. It is amateurish in spots (ooh, scary hell demons!), the acting is questionable (does this look subtle?), and the plot is flimsy (Petey bargains with the devil to return to earth to avenge himself on the comedians that had him killed, then tries to renege).
( It must be a groovy situation... )

It must have been Wednesday when we settled in for a night with Sting of Death, the second half of yet another Something Weird double feature. All in all, it was enjoyably bad, with all the low budget drive-in staples: booty-shaking dance sequences, fake blood, questionable special effects, bikinis, and marine biology grad students. Set in the garishly filmed, vividly green Florida Everglades, the film chronicles the battle between man and jellyfishman for life and love.
( And as we left the clam flowage that day, somehow we knew we would return... )

I read a whole slew of books last year; I had quite the 18th and 19th Century novel binge over the summer and fall. Clarissa stands out for a few reasons:
1. Really damn long. Holding the book up to read it was taxing, sometimes. But, in spots, it was almost compulsively page-turning. Towards the end of Clarissa's residence with her parents (which takes forever to unfold), the treachery and evilness of her brother and sister create a situation that is pretty viscerally dangerous at times. I wanted to give her brother a smackdown from the future.
2. It had some really amusing lines. (Probably unintentionally funny and due to change in language since the 1740s.) They were usually written by Anna Howe, the snarky confidante of the heroine. Example? (This is paraphrased.) "It has most fearfully rumpled my gorget!" (This one got some use, to the bafflement of others, who doubtlessly thought it was way racier than it is. I shall have to revive its use...)
3. Lovelace. Admittedly, this is very much colored by my viewing of the BBC adaptation of the novel, in which Lovelace was played by Sean Bean. The man's caption in life should read: Damn! He even looks appealing in a mullet!
4. Clarissa wasn't an entirely virtuous heroine, although she comes irritatingly close to moral perfection, especially towards the end (see #5). There is definitely part of her that finds Lovelace thrilling, despite his amoral hedonism.
5. The pathos of Clarissa's death -- it is ridiculously over the top, with her planning her funeral (down to the coffin design) in a garret as her health declines, sending out letters of forgiveness to her relatives, who are so abashed by their early behavior as to rend clothing and die of broken hearts.
6. A duel! Duels are big helps in novels as melodramatic as this one.
7. An epilogue in which the disposition of all the characters is outlined; the good are rewarded by satisying marriages with virtuous significant others, the evil by death, disease, and misery during marriages to the dull or vicious.

I don't have the energy to actually go into detail about all the movies I've watched recently, so I'm just going to list them until I do. Otherwise, I will forget them.

5 January: A cheerfully clichéd Italian crime drama/ homage to The Sting (complete with a rather fetching protagonist) called Gambling City. Surprisingly, the acting wasn't bad -- even Dayle Haddon did more than stand around looking pretty. Less surprisingly, the suits were amusingly loud. Not bad at all, for what it is.


4 January: For Y'ur Height Only. I don't know if the missing 'o' signifies anything, but I want to find out. This movie deserves it. After all, how many Filipino James Bond spoofs made with 2-foot, 9-inch action stars are there in this world? Maybe two, and Weng Weng is in both of them. In this gem, he plays 00, scourge of the Forces of Evil and beloved of all the ladies. He jump-kicks bad guys in the tender bits, rendering them immediately unconscious. He slides across marble floors on his back like a little human Swiffer. Which must be hell on dry-cleaning bills, as the white suit -- opened to mid-abdomen, natch -- seems to be the favored outfit for secret service agents in the Philippines.

Clearly, this one is a longer entry waiting to happen; there are too many wonderful things about it I want to commit to paper.

4 January: We also watched The Parallax View. It was nothing like For Y'ur Height Only, apart from the spy-stuff. For one thing, Warren Beatty's hair was probably the size of Weng Weng's entire torso -- Beatty was in full-on shag hairdo mode in this one -- and for another, this wasn't nearly so tongue in cheek. In all seriousness, it was a very well-made, thought-provoking movie. The shadow corporate government elements were triumphant in a depressing way, but it actually made me happy that the movie was made -- that society at one time would have supported something as genuinely questioning of authority made by a major studio. Not just hippy frolicking, but meaningful subversion.


3 January 2007: Black Magic was just bad, bad, bad. Some amusingly bad moments, mostly just clunky, head slappignly bad. I guess my boyfriend thought it was a witchcraft-themed martial arts movie -- it was a Shaw Brothers production, after all -- but there was nary a Kung Fu moment in it. Instead, the big fight between the evil magician and the good magician was fought with ritual prayer with skull-prop (bad guy) and a clarinet tune (good magician). Not very dynamic, really.


Before this, it was all about my Christmas DVDs -- Mystery Science Theatre boxsets and the last season of Homicide: Life on the Streets. God, I loved those shows. Especially the latter. Season 7 was by far the weakest, but even a weak Homicide epsiode beats most TV into a bland pulp.

The Spanish director Jesus Franco Mantera—aka “Jess Franco”—is someone whose films understandably appeal only to a specialized segment of Euro-sleaze cinema buffs. Moreover, even die-hard Francophiles are likely to have varying responses from one film to the next since he’s far from consistent in the quality of his work. At times he can take sordid, trashy, or otherwise mundane genre material and invest it with a visual style almost akin to that of an art house auteur--on these rarer occasions he is somewhat comparable to a director like Mario Bava. More often than not, however, Franco’s films (those after the sixties--e.g., Kiss Me Monster) tend to be interesting more for their narrative incoherence, abject seediness, and lazy camera style in which haphazard manipulation of the zoom lens seems to substitute for anything more visually interesting. The guy apparently directed about 187 (!) films in the long course of his career, and he seems not to have had any qualms about producing massive volumes of sheer dreck after some of his earlier films of genuine flair and artistry. Still, this can make him as fascinating as he is frustrating; his films may indeed encompass both the worst as well as the best of what European B-movies have to offer for those who are willing to explore this avenue.
( ...  )

Truly, a good time was had by all watching this one. Psychomania features a co-ed gang of upper-middle class English suburban teen-bikers who terrorize local shoppers and pram-pushing women sitting in public squares. They run people off country roads, ride their motorbikes around a stone circle (very Stonehenge à la Spinal Tap), and are generally troublemakers. Thankfully, they do have their names on the front of their jackets, so you can tell who they are.

And what are their names? Tom (the leader of the pack, a public menace and unfortunately-coiffed bad boy), Abby (his girlfriend, matching hairdo), Hinky, Jane (vixen!), Hatchet, Chopped Meat (he’s the musical one!), and Bertram (the best biker name ever, if you like your bikers effete and upper-crust). They wear matching helmets . They are… The Living Dead. They’re hard, man. They want to blow your mind.
( They’re on ur roads, ignoring ur traffic laws.  )

One day, I must own this movie.

The first thing I did after Super Inframan was over – when I calmed down, at least – was say to Professor Boyfriend how hard the movie was going to be to summarize in any coherent way. There are just so many beautifully cheesy things packed into a flimsy plot (with even flimsier special effects and foam rubber monster costumes galore), all paced quickly enough to hold the attention of hyperactive 7-year olds off their Ritalin for the day. It would have been great for Mystery Science Theater 3000, if there were any downtime between snarkable moments.
( And so the fright begins… )

Yeah, it was technically a miniseries, but there's a definite drop in my movie watching during the week, when the loved one is in Winston-Salem edjucatin the youths. The Buccaneers is based on a never-finished Edith Wharton novel -- she did leave notes behind when she died, but a little license can be taken. This particular one gives a very dramatic, sweeping, weep-inducingly romantic climax that is wrung for every drop of drama that can be milked. (Nothing wrong with that. See: Sirk, Douglas, my love for the films of) While not the favorite Wharton adaptation -- Scorcese has to take credit for that one with Age of Innocence -- this one is not too far behind it in sheer satisfaction. The acting is generally excellent, the frocks are lovely, and the settings opulent. I have a real affection for Mira Sorvino (hell, I went to Mimic when it was released theatrically, but that may have had a great deal to do with the presence of Jeremy Northam. Rowr.); plus Carla Gugino was amazingly good -- why isn't she working more? Greg Wise (aka Willoughby in S&S and Mr Emma Thompson) fits the part well as the romantic male lead. No complaints, really -- it's not a masterpiece, but it does the job satisfyingly well.
( Spoilers Ahoy! )