Archive for the ‘Film’ Category
Arnie (Jerry Mathers) is the first to have trouble with Harry.
The trouble with Harry, not to put too fine a point on it, is that he’s dead. And not only is he dead, he was inconsiderate enough to leave his body lying around, causing no end of problems for the living. Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) thinks he accidentally shot Harry while rabbit hunting, Miss Gravely (Mildred Natwick) thinks she killed him with a hiking boot, and Harry is found and hidden, buried and unburied, more times than anyone cares to remember. Captain Wiles, Miss Gravely, artist Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe), and Harry’s estranged wife, Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine), try to figure out who exactly killed Harry, what to do with his troublesome body, and how to keep Deputy Calvin Wiggs (Royal Dano) in the dark. Meanwhile, love blossoms between Sam and Jennifer and between Captain Wiles and Miss Gravely, and a millionaire art collector (Parker Fennelly) becomes interested in Sam’s work. [...]
Tags: 1950s, Alfred Hitchcock, Bernard Hermann, Comedy, Edmund Gwenn, Jack Trevor Story, Jerry Mathers, John Forsythe, John Michael Hayes, Mildred Dunnock, Mildred Natwick, Parker Fennelly, Philip Truex, Royal Dano, Shirley MacLaine
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Yeah. That's a lot of Helvetica.
I’ve studied design — I have a degree and everything — I’ve dabbled with typography (and with lettering), and, beneath my veneer of post-modernism and cyborg feminism, I’m a modernist at heart. So, I’ve always had a soft spot for Helvetica, the quintessential modernist typeface. Still, while its history and ubiquity are undoubtedly interesting, I wouldn’t have thought any typeface, even Helvetica, could generate enough material to fill a feature-length documentary. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Design, Documentary, Gary Hustwit, Helvetica
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John Oldman (David Lee Smith) ponders.
What if a man from the Upper Paleolithic survived until the present day?
What would he be like? Mortality is one of the defining characteristics of humanity; what would a man be like who will not die? A man who is fourteen thousand years old: he’s not only seen friends and lovers, wives and children come and go, he remembers the end of the last glacial period. He has, literally, forgotten more than any of us will ever know.
Jerome Bixby (1923–1998) was a science fiction writer, most famous for a handful of classic Trek episodes, including “Mirror, Mirror” which introduced the mirror universe, and for co-writing the story for Fantastic Voyage (1966). He began his last work, a screenplay called The Man from Earth, in the 1960s and finished it on his deathbed. Forty years is a long time to spend on a script, but it pays off in one of the most intelligent science fiction films I’ve seen. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Alexis Thorpe, Annika Peterson, David Lee Smith, Ellen Crawford, Jerome Bixby, John Billingsley, Neil Grieve, Richard Riehle, Richard Schenkman, Science Fiction, Tony Todd, William Katt
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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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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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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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