1981-1990

Synopsis
In another indictment of the flaws of our so-called civilization, this satire from the late director (Marco Ferreri) features (Christopher Lambert) as Michel, a miserable man who has failed at love and finds solace in a mechanical key holder. Michel has just been dumped by Barbara (Anemone) because he has not been able to get her pregnant. He is feeling pretty low when he finds a key holder with blue eyes and big red lips that responds to the sound of a whistle with “I Love You.” Michel tacks this gadget up on his TV set and whistles away. He seems happy with this fool-proof declaration of love until one day, the key holder responds to the neighbor’s whistle and Michel goes berserk. After all, if your key ring can’t be faithful, what’s the world coming to? ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie GuideRead More »

A camp melodrama/comedy about Sexilia (a nymphomaniac), Sadec (a gay Islamic terrorist), Riza Niro (the son of the emperor of Tiran), and Queti (the daughter of a dry-cleaner). When Riza Niro discovers that Sadec and his colleagues are after him, he disguises himself as a punk rocker, and falls in love with the stunning Sexilia, his first straight relationship. Meanwhile Queti, Sexilia’s “biggest fan”, helps Sexilia come to terms with her new life-style.Read More »

Plot Synopsis from allmovie.com by Eleanor Mannikka

This sometimes confusing erotic drama about the incestuous relationship of a mother and daughter is based on the autobiography of Italian theater actress Piera Degli Esposti though it focuses more on her mother Eugenia (Hanna Schygulla). The liberated Eugenia and her spaced-out, husband (Marcello Mastroianni) — a professor — live in a small provincial Italian town, where Eugenia is noticed as she zooms around on her bicycle and chats up strangers at the train station. While still no more than a grown child, Piera — in tight dresses — goes with her mother for a threesome when she engages in sexual relations with other men and subsequently suffers both from poor health and the lack of a normal home. The shadow of the future already clouds the household when Eugenia is committed again and again to the psychiatric clinic. By the time Piera has become an adult, both of her parents are in separate mental hospitals — and both (even the father) are still sexually eccentric, to say the least. (Hanna Schygulla) won the “Best Actress” award at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival for her portrayal of Eugenia.Read More »

This big budget entry from the early ’80s horror boom is one of the most underrated of that genre. The Entity succeeds despite potentially exploitative subject matter because it tells its story in a serious, respectful style. Frank de Felitta’s script devotes as much time to building three-dimensional characters and detailing the inner workings of psychology and parapsychology as it does creating shocks. As a result, the horrific parts of the tale are more effective because they are couched in a compelling reality. That said, The Entity never feels like anything less than a horror movie, thanks to forceful direction by Sidney J. Furie, who uses moody cinematography from Stephen Burum and an obsessive, minimalist score by Charles Bernstein to create an edgy, off-kilter atmosphere guaranteed to keep the audience tense between the set pieces. Finally, and most importantly, The Entity hooks the viewer thanks to phenomenal performances. Barbara Hershey gives a warm, totally credible performance as a decent, strong woman thrust into a bizarre situation, and Ron Silver adds excellent support as a well-meaning psychologist whose desire to find a rational explanation harms the situation as often as it helps. On the downside, a few of the makeup effects aren’t very convincing (especially when compared with strong physical and visual effects) and the open-ended coda might turn off some viewers, but the overall craftsmanship of the film is too strong to be denied. In short, The Entity is worthy of rediscovery by horror fans who want a little substance with their shocks. — Donald Guarisco (AMG)Read More »

Sterile practice
7 August 2010 | by oOgiandujaOo (United Kingdom)

My only previous experience of Farocki prior to watching Leben – BRD (How to live in the FRG) was Die Bewerbung (The Interview). The subject of that documentary film was the preparing of people who had difficulty finding work for job interviews. The movie highlighted how unnatural it was to be in a situation where you had to sell yourself (the training provides promotion of an unnatural self-awareness), where you have to project a compliant image for the Procrustean corporate scrutiniser. Leben – BRD expands on this limited scenario to provide a number of training scenarios. This includes training people to kill, provide obstetric care, separate those involved in domestic arguments etc. All this is interspersed with factory images of equipment being tested for longevity (for example a car door being opened and closed a thousand times by machine). It all comes off as quite banal and sterile programming. There is no room for personality, there is no room for personal connection. I’ve heard how feeling is something that has been outsourced to professionals (psychiatrists), here the psychiatrists are just as impersonal, running a child through a quick-march battery of standardised tests, getting a patient to draw a time series graph of the progression of their phobia, incapable of providing what the patient needs, a shoulder to cry on, someone to hug and understand.Read More »

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The deconstruction of visual pleasures and the emergence of a new visual poetry.

This experimental film is about the representation and alternative views trelated to the passage of time. The visual syntheses are assembled with the voices of the woman that gives birth and dies, and is torn by the conflicts inhabiting her body. “Topos” (Place) is in dialogue with the paintings of Uccello, Carpaccio, Cranach, De Chirico and Balthus, in an attempt to deconstruct the visual pleasures of traditional cinema, but simultaneously to give birth to an innovative seductive iconography.Read More »

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From its hazily Southwestern skyscraper surfaces to its barren, prickly bush and junk car-pocked bedrock, there’s something slightly off-kilter about the America of Paris, Texas. The central masculine cast is nothing if not indigenous—when the sun-punched Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) first stumbles into frame, his uncultivated, hirsute face and dusty red cap seem like natural geological formations that have been patiently waiting, cragged and craterous, for us to anticlimactically discover them—and the relationship-oriented, plot-shunning dialog by western playwright Sam Shepherd taps into dialectal heartbrokenness without a shred of disassociating local lingo. But there are tellingly alien factors: How did both Henderson brothers wind up with women who drip sophisticated European sex appeal from their ripe lips and honey hair? And why does every truck stop along highway 10 emit the same sickly green aura that glows like a clumsy, wistful metaphor against the ferociously red sunset? And how do aridly panoramic, sneeringly and smokily man-made L.A. skylines upstage the parched siltstone and yucca tree of God’s creation in a film with Texas in the title?Read More »

A former inspector on his last day with the department is called in to investigate a child murder. A suspect soon confesses to the crime, but knowing that the confession came only after the man was browbeaten in a relentless, 20-hour interrogation, the inspector’s keen police instincts tell him that the man is not the real murderer and that there is a serial killer at work, with the girl’s murder being related to other child murders that occurred in the area. However, he is alone in his assessment and the police close the case.Read More »