by ·Comments Off on How To Get Ahead In Advertising (1989, Bruce Robinson)

“Masturbating much?”
“Constantly! I have a talking boil on my neck.”

I think I was supposed to watch Withnail & I first, since it’s the one that got all the bonus features on the Criterion disc, but I felt like starting with this one. Somebody I know has warned me about these two movies once… can’t remember who, but anyway I liked this just fine, and will check out Withnail sometime.

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A usually-funny comedy about the advertising business. Dude is high-power ad exec until one troubling assignment to come up with a slogan for a zit cream. He has such trouble that he starts to question the entire practice of advertising… and that’s when a talking boil shows up on his neck, representing his bad ad-man self. It eventually takes over the body (with added mustache) with a good-guy-within boil on HIS neck. A little more gross than the usual angel/devil on your shoulder, but same idea. More anarchist (or communist) speeches (by the good anti-ad-man persona) than in most films. Remember the bizarre animated lovebirds, too.

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Writer/director Bruce Robinson (also wrote The Killing Fields) put together a good comedy, with an excellent lead performance by Richard Grant (Karaoke, some latter Altmans, and Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life).

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Movie feels not like an advertisement but like a political attack, like a speech, but without the actual speeches interrupting the comic flow of things. Energetic and fun(ny), worth watching for sure.

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by ·Comments Off on My Brother’s Wedding (1983, Charles Burnett)

Wasn’t expecting this at all. Has a real amateur-theater feel to the acting and dialogue, wasn’t knocked over by the direction or editing, so all I’m left with is the story/moral… which is pretty alright.

Pierce just wants to hang out with his cool friend Soldier, but his family’s bugging him about his college-grad brother’s impending marriage to a rich hottie (with whom Pierce does not get along). Well, Soldier dies and his funeral’s on the same day as the wedding. What will Pierce do? Idiotically, he races from the wedding to the funeral before his bro+girl have walked down the aisle. The wedding ring in his pocket, he doesn’t even make it to the funeral on time. What a douche.

Nothing against marginalized director Burnett’s intentions… making a little film about family and friendship and personal responsibility and “doing the right thing” (some six years before Do The Right Thing), focusing mostly on small things and small events, but the thing struck me as amateurish. Maybe my expectations were high for this one (“Burnett, lost masterpiece director”) and lowered for Killer of Sheep, which I loved a few weeks later.

by ·Comments Off on Ms. 45 (1981, Abel Ferrara)

A lonely mute girl gets raped, robbed, and raped again, all in one night. She stops the second guy though (kills him with an iron, chops him up), grabs his gun and goes on a vengeance spree through the city, killing just any man she can.

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All this killing takes its toll on her daily life, and her seamstress friends at work start to notice the change. She sort of goes from righteous victim to homicidal maniac, but then she never quite loses our affection either. A lot more carefully measured and watchable than the grating Driller Killer.

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One “victim” actually takes the gun and shoots himself out on a park bench. She doesn’t kill the dog (screen shot below). Eventually puts on the nun suit and goes all Carrie at a halloween party before she’s taken out.

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Scott Ashlin says:
“What we get instead is… a film that depicts men in the harshest and most unforgiving light, presenting them as legitimately deserving a substantial proportion of Thana’s wrath. Simply put, Ms. .45 has no patience with mitigating circumstances. In this movie, people, both men and women, are defined entirely by what they do rather than by who they are. It doesn’t matter, or so Ms. .45 contends, whether an exploiter had a rough childhood or a bad day at work or a steady stream of shitty luck with the girls he dated in his formative years. Violence buys violence, end of story.”

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September 2011: Great to see this again on 35mm at Cinefest.

by ·Comments Off on Wuthering Heights [Hurlevent] (1985, Jacques Rivette)

I think the title Hurlevent means something about the wind.

Well-bred Catherine loves Roch, an orphan her family has raised from a young kid with the help of servant Helene. Catherine’s brother William has taken over their estate and wants to get rid of Roch. Cat meets Olivier by chance and stays at his estate, gets to know him and his sister Isabelle, he eventually proposes. Roch disappears after overhearing a conversation about his being below Cat’s social class, comes back rich three years later, Cat and Olivier are now engaged and William is a drunken gambling addict. Roch wins the estate from William and hangs around until Catherine dies from illness.

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Movie opens with a great looking dream scene of Catherine and Roch on a rocky hill while William watches, hidden. Has a few interesting parts like that, but mostly just a good-looking literary adaptation of a dreary story. Rivette’s not especially proud of it either… I think we can mostly ignore this one.

Interesting soundtrack, only used in a few scenes. Valérie Hazette in her Senses of Cinema article says: “The only concession to lyricism can be found in the magical accents of Le mystère des voix bulgares, a Bulgarian choir’s album.”

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Rivette says about the adaptation: “I had decided not to re-read it: I asked Pascal to summarise it for me. I only wanted to have the outline of the story and of the characters, that’s all. And from the start, I told him: “Only the first part”, because I knew about the second part. I had a very strong memory of the Wyler movie – because I hate it – and of the Buñuel movie because, as you know, I find it very beautiful. The characters are 40, but still, the movie remains very, very powerful.”

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Francois Truffaut died a few days after the shoot. “For the whole length of the shoot, every single day, we were expecting to receive the phone call that would tell us ‘François has died…’ it was a truly harrowing situation.”

“Since it was necessary to condense quite a lot, by force of circumstance, I believe that it is indeed the most elliptical of all my movies. Otherwise I might have made a three or three-and-a-half hour movie, like I usually do. But there, we were obliged to simplify, to keep to the essentials. It might have given a more vigorous and energetic feel to it …”

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by ·Comments Off on The Howling (1981, Joe Dante)

Reporter is stalked by serial killer who turns out to be a werewolf. Then to recover from all that, she’s sent to a retreat which turns out to be a werewolf cult. Bad news!

Her doctor is a werewolf. The stalker’s family are werewolves. Her friend is killed by a werewolf. Her husband falls for a werewolf. Her husband becomes a werewolf. Your sister is a werewolf.

Your werewolf:
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Your sister:
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Another friend buys silver bullets from an antique bookstore owner (Dante regular Dick Miller), goes to the country and whups some werewolf ass, locks everyone in the barn, sets fire to it, and has a close escape… TOO close, cuz the reporter gets bitten! They expose their story by having her wolf-out live on her next newscast (to the horror of her boss, Dante fave Kevin McCarthy), then her friend shoots her and we end.

You should’ve seen him in “Piranha”:
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Keeps silver bullets in stock:
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Fun werewolf effects, movie manages to be a little scary, is less funny than the others… mostly just a good time. Star Dee Wallace-Stone (later star of Critters and Cujo, mom in E.T., Jake Busey’s co-killer in The Frighteners) has got a good scream on her. Her buddy Dennis Dugan is currently gathering bit parts in Adam Sandler movies. Her hairy husband Chris Stone was also in Cujo (he must be the Stone in Wallace-Stone). Another Dante fave, Robert Picardo (Mark Dark in 976-EVIL), is the serial killer Eddie Quist. Elisabeth Brooks is the goth hottie. John Carradine (of The Return of Frank James, Man Hunt, and Red Zone Cuba) must’ve been the old man wandering the werewolf camp, and Slim Pickens was the sheriff.

Cujo:
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Carradine?
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by ·Comments Off on Sleepaway Camp (1983, Robert Hiltzik)

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Still a fun movie, much better than it oughtta be, but not worth watching a whole bunch of times. Two kids are out on lake with dad, when one kid and dad are killed by a motorboat. The daughter survives and is given to nutty aunt, right? Nope, it was the son who survived, but nutty aunt gave him a girl’s name and turned him into a girl (not physically), causing him to be a twisted killer (see above photo) at summer camp. Lots of fun killing and neat makeup effects ensue.

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Katy would not have liked this at all.

by ·Comments Off on Night of the Demons (1988, Kevin Tenney)

Ugh.

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I thought I remembered this was a good movie. Bad 80’s music and bad 80’s hair and clothes and effects and acting and story and whatever. Even the bookend old-man-eating-razorblades story sucked.

Things I forgot: Angela’s not so bad until infected by demons, the black guy doesn’t die first (or even at all), the dialogue is terrible. There’s naked girls, though. The director later made Witchboard II and Pinocchio’s Revenge.

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Katy wouldn’t have liked it.

by ·Comments Off on Purple Rain (1984, Albert Magnoli)

Prince (“The Kid”) has a dad who was a great musician and who likes to beat women. Like father, like son. Prince’s slot performing at First Ave is in danger because the slimy club owner and the slimier Morris Day want to replace him with a girl group – and Prince’s own band members are threatening revolution (hyuck) cuz he won’t play the songs they wrote. What will Prince do?! Not learn to be nice to people, and not stop his dad from killing himself, but he does turn his band members’ demo into the groovy title song, so there’s that. Movie scores points for music, costumes, Prince’s motorcycle, and hot nudity, but loses a lot to dialogue, plot and acting. A concert film (with hot nudity) would’ve been a better idea.

by ·Comments Off on Matador (1986, Almodovar)

Diego (Nacho Martinez) is an ex-bullfighter. Now injured, he teaches his matador skills to a class which includes Angel (Antonio Banderas), who lives across the street from Diego’s cute young girlfriend Eva (Eva Cobo). Meanwhile, elsewhere in town, Maria (Assumpta Serna, later in Sam Fuller’s Day of Reckoning and the Quays’ Piano Tuner of Earthquakes) worships Diego, and has started killing men Matador-style while having sex with them.

After lamely trying to rape Eva (demonstrating the same stalkerish, kidnapping behavior as every other Almodovar film he’s in), religion-oppressed Antonio turns himself in to the police inspector (Eusebio Poncela from Law of Desire, who looks a lot like Diego so I thought the Matador was also the inspector for a few confusing minutes). That leads nowhere, but to get his mother (Julieta Serrano, the crazy Lucia from Women on the Verge) and her mother (Chus Lampreave, Leo’s mother in Flower of My Secret) all upset.

Two murders are discovered and two more are suspected, and Antonio is blamed… but it’s the work of the star-crossed Matadors, with whom Antonio has some sort of psychic link. Eventually they get to kill each other like they’ve always dreamed of doing. A happy ending!

More suicide and bullfights and movies (the gore films Diego watches while masturbating at the beginning) and the usual cast. A lot more zany than Law of Desire, and to its benefit… more fun to watch. Law of Desire’s murder + police themes seemed tacked on, but Matador is all about the murder and the investigation… seems more sure of itself (until the psychic bit at the end, I guess).