1971-1980

Plot Outline :
In July 1976, an Air France flight from Tel-Aviv to Paris via Athens was hijacked and forced to land in Entebbe, Uganda. The Jewish passengers were separated and held hostage in demand to release many terrorists held in Israeli prisons. After much debate, the Israeli government sent an elite commando unit to raid the airfield and release the hostages. The film is based on the true facts and follows the events since the flight’s takeoff and until the hostages’ return to Israel.Read More »

Synopsis:

A gentle, bittersweet tragicomedy, Autumn Marathon is about a middle-aged translator, Andrei Buzykin (Oleg Basilashvili), whose almost pathological niceness has trapped him in a seemingly endless series of awkward situations: his inability to turn anyone down has left him juggling a wife and mistress, on top of vast amounts of additional work usually done as unpaid favours for friends and students that’s constantly interfering with his own projects to the point where his career is put at risk.

And because he can’t bear to hurt anyone, he’s always taking the easy way out – which invariably means constructing a vast edifice of lies that he can’t possibly keep track of, which has the equally inevitable side-effect of turning a fundamentally decent if weak-willed man into what looks like the epitome of a philandering boor. Half the time, his excuses are entirely genuine – he really did help his Danish friend Bill Hansen (Norbert Kuchinke) at a drying-out clinic, and stayed up all night with his less talented colleague Varvara (Galina Volchek) to help her on a difficult translation, but this counts for little when he’s so widely disbelieved. The title refers to his regular early morning jogging sessions with Bill – again, he’d much rather be doing something else, like staying in bed, but how can he possibly say no?Read More »

Quote:
The 1975 film by Georgi Daneliya “Afonya” was an unexpected commercial hit in USSR. The main character Borshev A.N. is a locksmith who spends his free time, as well as working hours, drinking with his buddies whom he even doesn’t recognize the next day after another heavy drink. His wife leaves him, his boss places him on probation, his whole life is falling a part but he doesn’t realize it. There is only one person who can save him – nurse Katya whom he met on dances and didn’t pay much attention to… Daneliya manages to balance in the film satire and drama, quotes from the film gained a cult status in Russia and other former countries of USSR.Read More »

Mimino is a Georgian helicopter pilot, carrying all sort of stuff (humans, animals, objects… and movies) to and from the isolated villages in the astoundingly beautiful Georgian valleys.

His dream is to become a jet pilot, traveling the world and enjoying the company of nice hostesses, and for this reason he moves to Moskva aiming to obtain his promotion. While in Moskva orchestrating his way to meet Aeroflot executives, he stumbles on an Armenian truck driver with whom he’ll have to share struggles in the big metropolis.Read More »

Review
This 1980 attempt to cut in on the “midnight movie” market created by The Rocky Horror Picture Show has become a camp classic for all the wrong reasons. The Apple is fascinating because it takes a conceptual wrong turn at every angle: the ‘futuristic’ production design looks garish and cheap instead of sleek, the tone constantly veers back and forth between comedy and melodrama and the script is a mind-boggling muddle of religious overtones, heavy-handed “showbiz” satire and silly attempts at an anti-totalitarian message. The Apple’s serious intentions are further crippled by weak performances: George Gilmour makes a stone-faced, emotionally inert hero and Catherine Mary Stewart is too bland a romantic lead to inspire any interest in the film’s romantic subplot. The only actor who escapes unscathed is Vladek Sheybal, who applies a light comedic touch to the villainous Mr. Boogalow that escapes the rest of the cast. Despite these seemingly insurmountable flaws, The Apple remains surprisingly watchable if one has a taste for schlock: director Menahem Golan keeps up a speedy pace that delivers the film’s bizarre melange of mismatched elements at a breezy clip and the outrageous musical score delivers an unintentionally funny but always catchy musical number every few minutes. The finished product seldom makes sense but delivers so much sheer oddness at such a high speed that it is virtually impossible to be bored by this film. As a result, The Apple will probably baffle most viewers but trash devotees will find it to be a ‘schlock musical’ classic worthy of Can’t Stop The Music or Grease 2. ~ Donald Guarisco, All Movie GuideRead More »

Synopsis :
Stavros Tornes’ first non-fiction short combines a beautifully poetic text with a series of tracking shots in the streets of Rome, set to music by Charlotte Van Gelder. Somewhere between documentary and poetic essay, this film was born out of Tornes’ love for Africa and the Orients, his never-ending agony over bloody revolutions and his passionate use of cinema to approach the Other.Read More »

Quote:
[A] radical reinvention of [Hamlet was] carried out by Celestino Coronado in a 16mm-and-video project made at the Royal College of Art in 1976. Taking its cue from Hamlet’s speech to Gertrude concerning “the counterfeit presentment of two brothers”, Coronado casts identical twins Anthony and David Meyer as not only twin Hamlets but also the Ghost, Laertes and the Player King, with Helen Mirren playing both Gertrude and Ophelia. Though the budget was admittedly tiny, this was not a money-saving device: this doubling served to emphasise the way the play’s characters frequently mirror each other in method and motivation.Read More »

Dustin (Tom Sullivan) is the leader of a rock band on the brink of super-stardom. Until now they have juggled their music career with cocaine smuggling. The musicians, and their manager Raf (Jack Palance), wish to sever ties with organized-crime, leave the drug world behind and concentrate on music. However they are coerced into doing one last job for the Mob. They lose the $2 million of cocaine, and find themselves marked men unless they can fulfill their obligations.Read More »

Synopsis:
Three sexy women, raised separately as orphans, are summoned to a funeral, where they learn that they are in fact sisters and that the dead woman was their mother. The latter had been a secret agent – the notorious Double Agent 73 (a reference to Wishman’s earlier “Chesty Morgan” flicks) – who had been murdered in the line of duty. (The actress shown playing her in flashback bears very little resemblance to that formidably proportioned actress-stripper, especially at the bust level — but of course, who could?). She had used her feminine wiles (if you know what I mean) to seduce and betray enemy agents, but was rather careless in executing this modus operandi – the unwanted daughters being one of the job hazards. The executor of the will tells the girls that they can inherit a cool million each as long as they can track down their mother’s killer within one calendar year. Plenty of absurd violence and nudity ensues.Read More »