Author Archive
One of Van Gogh's lesser known works: Crazy Woman and Sunflowers.
There are good directors, there are bad directors, and then there are directors like Jesús “Jess” Franco. I like Franco, but the man is a cipher: his œuvre consists of a great many bad films and a few gems; he seems often to be technically incompetent, but he was good enough to A.D. for Orson Welles; his films are often blatantly pornographic and shamelessly exploitative, but a very few of them are honest-to-god works of genius. You can watch ten of his movies, and nine of them will be awful. Then, just when you’re about to dismiss him as a hack, the tenth will be a weird, surreal, seemingly-accidental masterpiece. I honestly can’t decide if he’s just a hack who happened to make a few good films from some twisted law of probability or if he’s a good director who only occasionally cared enough, was given enough money, and free enough reins to put in some effort. My relationship with Franco’s work is a constant search for those aberrations in his œuvre. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Carmen Montes, Exploitation, Fata Morgana, Jess Franco, Lesbian Horror, LGBT, Lina Romay, Snakewoman, Vampire, Vampyros Lesbos
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Lady Alexander (Luciana Paluzzi) moonlights as Jane's (Camille Keaton) hairstylist.
Before hitting the big time, such as it was, in Day of the Woman (Zarchi, 1978), Camille Keaton spent several years in Italy making low-budget movies such as this one, which has the lovely, giallo-tinged original title Extracts from the secret archives of a European capital’s police force.
The plot concerns three ostensibly British gentlemen and a girl (at least, the script seems to think it’s set in Britain, given the references to the Scotland Yard): Bill (Tony Isbert), a rich boy with a mommy complex; Joe (Máximo Valverde) and Fred (Giovanni Petrucci), a couple of working-class guys who are seemingly just out to scam some money from Bill; and Jane (Camille Keaton). The relationships between our heroic quartet is never made clear, except that all the boys seem to be infatuated with young Jane. And really, who can blame them? [...]
Tags: 1970s, Black Mass, Camille Keaton, Exploitation, Giallo, Giovanni Petrucci, Horror, Jess Franco, José Calvo, José Gutiérrez Maesso, Leonardo Martín, Luciana Paluzzi, Mario Bianchi, Máximo Valverde, Paul Müller, Riccardo Freda, Robert Hampton, Tony Isbert, Tragic Ceremony
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Countess Nadine Carody (Soledad Miranda): mysterious vampire, interpretive dancer.
Linda Westinghouse (Ewa Strömberg) is a lawyer who has a recurring dream about a mysterious brunette (Soledad Miranda, credited as Susann Korda) whom she later, on a date with her boyfriend, Omar (Andrés Monales), sees dancing in a nightclub. The dance involves Miranda taking off her clothes and putting them on a mannequin, which brings the doll to life. “You are very excited,” says Omar to Linda. Linda denies it, but in a session with her therapist, Dr. Steiner (Paul Müller) — who doodles distractedly in his notebook, which quite subtly sets up a recurring theme of masculine disregard for women’s experiences — we learn otherwise; Linda confesses that her dreams of Miranda have more than once brought her to orgasm. [...]
Tags: 1970s, Andrés Monales, Beni Cardoso, Dennis Price, Ewa Strömberg, Exploitation, Jaime Chávarri, Jess Franco, José Martínez Blanco, Lesbian Horror, LGBT, Manfred Hübler, Paul Müller, Siegfried Schwab, Soledad Miranda, Vampire, Vampyros Lesbos
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A comparison of the new and the classic interfaces.
It’s hard to believe now, when they’re known mostly for rushing out one half-finished Star Wars game after another (for one Christmas season after another), but in the late eighties and early nineties, LucasArts were, along with Sierra On-Line, the première adventure game company in the business. For a period of some fifteen years, beginning with Maniac Mansion, they released some of the best-regarded point-and-click adventures of the era. In 1990, at the peak of their powers, they released The Secret of Monkey Island. For a generation of gamers, Monkey Island‘s combination of fourth-wall-breaking comedy and clever puzzles became the standard against which all later adventure games were measured. [...]
Tags: 1990s, 2000s, Adventure, Alexandra Boyd, Dave Grossman, Dominic Armato, Earl Boen, Games, Leilani Jones, LucasArts, Point and Click, Ron Gilbert, Secret of Monkey Island, Tim Schafer, Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade
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Colonel Jack (Kurt Russell) and Action Jackson (James Spader) take in the atmosphere.
OK. Let’s get the opening confessions out of the way: I’m a Stargate SG-1 fan, and the last time I saw the feature was more than ten years ago, long before the series premièred. So, I won’t pretend I don’t see the series as the “real” version of the mythos, but I’ve tried to keep an open mind. [...]
Tags: 1990s, Action, Alexis Cruz, Brad Wright, Dean Devlin, Erick Avari, James Spader, Jaye Davidson, Kurt Russell, Michael Shanks, Mili Avital, Richard Dean Anderson, Roland Emmerich, Science Fiction, Stargate
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101: New Girl in Town
Rebecca Locke (Rachel Nichols): New girl in town.
Special Agent Alvarez is found murdered, apparently the work of a serial killer she and the rest of the violent crimes unit (VCU) had been hunting. Her replacement is Rebecca Locke (Rachel Nichols), fresh from a stint as an analyst in Washington, DC. Locke was abducted when she was 10 years old and escaped after several months of captivity. It’s later revealed that the head of the VCU, Virgil “Web” Webster, was instrumental in getting her accepted to the FBI, because he thinks her childhood experience will be useful in catching serial offenders. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Adam Baldwin, Allan Kroeker, Crime, Howard Gordon, Jane Espenson, Katie Finneran, Mutant Enemy, Procedural, Rachel Nichols, The Inside, Tim Minear
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Slavoj admires a staircase.
According to the cover of Žižek!, Slovenian philosopher and psychologist Slavoj Žižek is “the Elvis of cultural theory,” and the film itself certainly seems to agree. Director Astra Taylor follows Žižek around the world (well, to Slovenia, New York, and Buenos Aires), as he lectures, gives interviews, and jokes around about his cultural theories. This is interspersed with graphics and archive footage, and with scenes of Žižek doing everyday things — talking with his son, eating dinner, buying DVDs.
And since Žižek is a charming man and fun to listen to, it’s rather an enjoyable journey, and the film manages some insights in his works. The problem is that there just isn’t enough time to fully explore or explain his ideas, and the film has an annoying tendency of leaving things unexplained so that it can cut to another clip of Žižek making jokes. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Astra Taylor, Cultural Theory, Documentary, Jacques Lacan, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Slavoj Žižek
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Esther, Anna, Johan: Objects in space
Two women, Esther (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), travel by train to a hotel in an unnamed foreign city along with Anna’s young son, Johan (Jörgen Lindström). Esther is dying and is left in the hotel room while Anna goes out to have sex with a waiter and Johan explores the hotel.
Like the two preceding films in Bergman’s “trilogy of faith” — Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light — The Silence is a series of failed communications, and continues the exploration of the search for meaning in a world where God is silent. So silent is he in this film that he is barely mentioned. A church is mentioned in passing as a cool place where Anna had sex with the waiter; the church in The Silence is a wholly corporeal place, devoid of grace, offering only bodily comfort. And like in Winter Light, the spectre of war hangs over The Silence: outside the train on their way to the city, they see lines and lines of tanks outside the window. [...]
Tags: 1960s, Drama, Gunnel Lindblom, Ingmar Bergman, Ingrid Thulin, Jörgen Lindström, The Silence, Trilogy of Faith
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Thomas (Gunnar Björnstrand) and Märta (Ingrid Thulin).
A widowed priest, Thomas (Gunnar Björnstrand), has lost his faith in God. After a sermon, a fisherman, Jonas (Max von Sydow), comes to see him, troubled by his own lack of faith and anxious about the state of the world — he saw a news story saying the Chinese are brought up to hate us, and that they’ll soon have the bomb. Thomas speaks to Jonas and thinks he was able to help, but Jonas shoots himself soon after their conversation. Meanwhile, the local schoolteacher, Märta (Ingrid Thulin), is in love with Thomas, who either is unable to love her back or is at least unable to admit to himself that he loves her. [...]
Tags: 1960s, Drama, Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingmar Bergman, Ingrid Thulin, Max von Sydow, Trilogy of Faith, Winter Light
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Karin (Harriet Andersson) finds God.
A second-rate author, David (Gunnar Björnstrand), his son and daughter, Minus (Lars Passgård) and Karin (Harriet Andersson), and the daughter’s husband, Martin (Max von Sydow), are staying on an island. Karin is a latent schizophrenic who has just gotten back from hospital, while David has just returned from Switzerland, where he fled to write when Karin fell ill. On the island, Karin’s condition worsens; she wakes in the night and goes up to the attic, where she hears voices talking from behind the frayed wallpaper. They tell her to read her father’s diary, where she learns that her condition is incurable and that her father is disgusted to find himself studying her as a subject for his writing. Meanwhile, Minus tries and fails to connect with his father, and Martin grows ever more desperate at his inability to help Karin. [...]
Tags: 1960s, Drama, Gunnar Björnstrand, Harriet Andersson, Ingmar Bergman, Lars Passgård, Max von Sydow, Through a Glass Darkly, Trilogy of Faith
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