by ·Comments Off on Vogel 21: Coming Apart and Broughton

Coming Apart (1969, Milton Moses Ginsberg)

“Where would we get a duck? I don’t even have a dresser.” Pervert Month continues, as psychologist Rip Torn sets up a hidden camera to watch him have sex with all his neurotic patients, and anyone else who knocks on his door.

Women who join Rip include Julie “daughter of John” Garfield (Ishtar)… Viveca Lindfors, the Swede in Run For Cover… and Sally Kirkland of Demme’s Crazy Mama. The online plot description say Rip induces his own mental breakdown, but it’s Sally who aims a gun at herself then trashes his office in slow-mo at the end. Rather than emphasizing breakdown, Amos Vogel tells the story as Rip’s “increasingly problematic sex life.”

From Film as a Subversive Art: The End of Sexual Taboos: Erotic and Pornographic Cinema, Vogel goes on and on (usefully) about censorship laws. “One can only hope that eventually arousal of erotic feelings in the cinema will take the place of the aggression and violence predominant in films today,” sorry sir. The director is better known for Werewolf of Washington, a movie so notorious that pd187’s review of it was removed by a moderator.

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The Bed (1967, James Broughton)

A bed romps stop-motion through a field, then a nude couple materializes and romps around the bed. More and more people appear through the magic of editing, some of them nude. The music is ghastly electro-harpsichord.

Favorite scenes: a woman reads to her dog… lizard crawls out of a guy’s mouth and transforms into a girl… wild girl with horse tail rides old Colonel Sanders guy until he runs away.

Vogel:

The actors, who exuberantly perform scenes of the human comedy, include Imogen Cunningham, Alan Watts, and other San Francisco artists and writers. While even avant-garde nudity seems often to betray an absence of joyful or uncomplicated sex, The Bed displays a smiling, polymorphously-perverse eroticism.

Nuptiae (1969, James Broughton)

Sound is awful again (panpipes and poetic narration) but concept is good (legal government marriage ceremony juxtaposed with ancient/traditional portraits of marriage). Incredible that you could hire Stan Brakhage to photograph your little movie. “The union of opposites, the wedding of pleasure and pain,” oh, is this a Hellraiser thing?

by ·Comments Off on Hawks and Sparrows (1966, Pier Paolo Pasolini)

The rare movie with a bird title that is not a metaphor, two guys (long-faced comedian Toto and the curly-haired young guy from every Pasolini movie, both of them very good) are sent by St. Francis to spread the good word to the hawks and the sparrows. They spend a year in a field until Toto learns to talk to hawks and tell them about god. Stalking sparrows in a churchyard, Toto attracts a following, getting overrun with townspeople building a festival around him, finally begs forgiveness then rampages through the place, pelting nuns with ricotta. When they see a hawk eat a sparrow, they inform St. Francis and he tells them to start over. Back in the present-day framing story, I don’t like how the film crew keeps pulling the talking communist crow by a string. Not sure if the plot disintegrated in the last third or if I’d had too many beers, but Toto gets as tired of the dubbed crow as I did, and eats it.

It’s not a serious movie:

St. Francis, also of Rossellini’s Cartesius:

Philosophy:

by ·Comments Off on One Plus One/Sympathy for the Devil (1968, Jean-Luc Godard)

After La Chinoise and Weekend, JLG was hired to film the Rolling Stones for some reason. If the Stones were happy for this and Gimme Shelter to be released, then Cocksucker Blues must be really bad. Are there any movies where this band actually comes off well? Guess that’s what Shine a Light will be. What we do get is beautiful color film of the recording of one of their most famous songs, first as a restrained folk-rock number, repeatedly practicing the delicate intro before the drums come in, finally turning the song into a hootfest with your granny on bongos. The Heinz Emigholz motorik doc wasn’t kidding around when it stole this movie’s title.

In between studio recording segments are episodes that look like movie scenes but don’t behave like them, long takes with dialogue moving in trance loops. Black power, Vietnam war, Sexual revolution – Anne Wiazemsky (same year as Teorema) is being interviewed in the woods, he asks obscure questions and she answers only yes/no. “When the novel is dead then the technological society will be totally upon us.” Then sometimes a narrator will read us comic stories or pornography.

by ·Comments Off on Down With Love (2003, Peyton Reed)

Revisited one of the greatest battle-of-the-sexes 1960s-flashback non-musical comedies with K and her mom. Really a two-person show, with good supporting parts for Ewan’s boss Niles (who should’ve been in more movies) and Renee’s agent Sarah Paulson (unfortunately best known as the psychologist in Glass).

by ·Comments Off on Magical Mystery Tour (1967, The Beatles)

This collection of TV music videos with a loose framing story seems more like first-take/b-roll mess. Is it for kids? Was it influenced by The Monkees? They probably explained briefly in Anthology how this turned out so badly, and I already forgot.

At least each song gets a different visual treatment and some are nice (like the color-filtered mountainscapes over an instrumental song) and not just over-literal imagery (showing policemen in a row for the line “policemen in a row”). And at least during the awful narrative parts (Ringo squabbling with his aunt on a bus) we get nice symphonic versions of early band hits.

Have they been watching Kenneth Anger? Paul does his best silly walk. Ridiculous striptease with the Bonzo Dog Band. I don’t know if people back then knew who Mal was, but after you’ve seen Get Back it’s impossible not to notice him in every scene here. The anonymous veteran co-director was poor old Bernie Knowles, DP of The 39 Steps, now working with DP Richard Starkey.

by ·Comments Off on Tattooed Life (1965, Seijun Suzuki)

Fighting Elegy star Hideki Takahashi is Tetsu, an assassin whose life is saved by artist Kenji (star of Black Snow, not that one). Broke, our guys try to find anonymous manual work, but get tangled up with women and get themselves noticed (and implicated in murders and explosions). Kenji sketches the boss’s wife naked, which doesn’t go over well with the boss, and now Tetsu has to avenge his stupid brother. Suzuki brings mad style to the final ten minutes – which is an improvement over the one minute of mad style in Kanto Wanderer.

by ·Comments Off on Festival (1967, Murray Lerner)

Another concert compilation film, this one taken from multiple years of folk fests.

PP&M sing their hit song about having a hammer and a couple Dylan tunes, but more importantly Mary appears to have two moles on her neck in a vampire bite pattern. Seeger sings about creamed corn, some bluegrass guys tear it up, some blues guys chill it out. Joan Baez gets the best lines during an autograph session and an after-show interview, including telling fans “don’t get so hysterical,” which hits hard in this beatlemanic era. She’s down to earth in a film otherwise full of statements like “you don’t choose to play music, music chooses to play you.”

Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers:

Movie stops dead while a couple of guys attempt to explain the blues, less successfully than the Edward Bland movie explained jazz. I appreciate the continuation of a TNT Show theme by showing the white audience clap out-of-time with Howlin’ Wolf. Lerner had a perfect career, making nothing but rock docs. One of the DPs later shot more than one Dick Sargent thriller.

by ·Comments Off on The Ladies Man (1961, Jerry Lewis)

Jerry gets a live-in job at a womens boarding house. It’s overwhelming but whenever he tries to sneak out, they tell him he’s important to them, so he stays. Movie has very little story, very few good jokes, but some of the best-ever set design.

The girls include Gloria Jean, two decades after hurting WC’s ears in Never Give a Sucker, Billy Wilder regular Hope Holiday, and Kathleen Freeman, the only actor in Fritz Lang’s House by the River to also appear in Shrek. Buddy Lester is quite good as a scarfaced antagonist, George Raft significantly less good as himself.

by ·Comments Off on Don’t Look Back (1967, D.A. Pennebaker)

Pretty funny that as the Beatles came to the USA playing havoc in the media with their jokey answers to interview questions, Dylan went to England to do the same. This is more of a hotel room hangout movie than expected, and Bob gets aggressive and confrontational. Joan Baez comes across a ton better than she did in the TNT Show, harmonizing with Bob on Hank Williams songs. They’re in full folkie mode, Bob not having Gone Electric until a couple months after filming.

When I said Joan comes across well I meant musically, not lighting

unrelated: guess who I’ve got tickets to see this summer