Comedy

Aspiring photographer Susan Weinblatt (Melanie Mayron) and would-be poet Anne Munroe (Anita Skinner) are best friends and roommates in a fivie-flight walk-up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. But one day Anne decides to marry and move out. When the best friends go their separate ways, Girlfriends focuses on what happens to the one left behind. It’s about valuable, delicate, and complex ties that bind people–girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, and lovers. Producer/director Claudia Weill captures the offbeat charm and edgy moments of city life, as well as a gem of a performance by Mayron in her first starring role.Read More »

Synopsis:
Henry Orient (Peter Sellers) is a madly egocentric and overly amorous avant-garde concert pianist who is hilariously pursued all around New York City by two fourteen-year-old fans. The girls, Valarie “Val” Campbell Boyd (Tippy Walker) and Marian “Gil” Gilbert (Merrie Spaeth) chase a harassed Henry all over the city, thwarting his afternoon liaisons with a married woman and leaving utter chaos behind them – until Val’s sexually promiscuous mother, Isabel (Dame Angela Lansbury), appears on the scene to put a stop to the girls’ shenanigans.Read More »

Synopsis:
Seven segments related to one another only in that they all purport to be based on sections of the book by David Reuben. The segments range from “Do Aphrodisiacs Work?” in which a court jester gives an aphrodisiac to the Queen and is, in the end, beheaded to “What Happens During Ejaculation?” in which we watch “control central” during a successful seduction.Read More »

During the reign of Emperor Jia Jing of the Ming Dynasty, the evil court official Yan Song relies on the emperor favoritism towards him, becoming overbearing and domineering. An honest official Zhang Ying Long impeaches Yan Song w/ a “Ten Cimes Five Deceits” against him. But instead he gets flogged 30 times, and banished to a far off frontier Guizhou.Read More »

Vampire’s Kiss follows the story of yuppie literary agent Peter Loew (Nicolas Cage) as he descends into madness and vampirism. Loew believes he has been bitten by a vampire (Jennifer Beals) and is slowly becoming one himself, despite the contrary opinion of his therapist (Elizabeth Ashley). He then begins to wage a campaign of escalating terror against his secretary and first potential victim, Alva (Maria Conchita Alonso, looking appropriately baffled). Alva begs her parents to let her stay home from work to avoid her unusual boss, but they force her to go on that fateful day, and the plot unfolds.Read More »

Synopsis:
Ghost trains and ghostly characters, figuratively speaking of course, are what run through the perpetual night of this underground metro system. Bulcsú’s (Sándor Csányi) life that once was, on the surface, where the real people go home after work, who go to the movies or a fine restaurant is now replaced by the dark, cold and solitude arena of his new dwellings. He, and his motley crew of ragtag metro ticket Kontrollers must patrol the trains that run these City dwellers back and forth and with daily ritual, check that no one dare come down into their world for a free ride. With indifferent passengers, a possible love interest, a regime set on competition and to top it all a mysterious serial killer at large, Kontroll is a dark and bleak comedy of the world of the ticket inspector, who, in the end must keep this Metro system running. If not, what would be the worst that could happen, if they ever lost control? Dare you ride here for free, too?Read More »

A young video camera-wielding Japanese tourist traveling alone in Hong Kong pursues a tentative relationship with a Chinese teenager planning to join her family in Canada. Wai invites the young man to join her for a spectacular home-cooked meal made by her 80-year old grandmother. As their platonic friendship develops, the subtle relationships between generations, upheavals in traditional Hong Kong society and the clash between Asian cultural identities are explored with considerable warmth, charm and humor.Read More »

Quote:
Billy Wilder’s 1974 remake of the Ben Hecht – Charles MacArthur play The Front Page, famously adapted 34 years before, by Howard Hawks as His Girl Friday, is widely regarded as that point in time when Wilder’s art went into rapid decline, that the picture demonstrated that the director of Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole, and The Apartment had lost his confidence, that he had become out of step with the times and could no longer connect with the tastes of a changing movie-going audience. In fact The Front Page is a reasonably successful adaptation, darkly cynical like most of Wilder’s best work. Wilder and collaborator I.A.L. Read More »

Quote:
In this movie, TV sets are full of life. If a person is in TV (e.g. because it was filmed on the street) it has a double that’s right in the TV set. This double needs energy from the true character to survive. Each time, the real human watches TV, his Double will pull life energy from him. So there’s a mysterious Death-serial. Many persons die in front of their TV set and nobody knows why. Olda, the main character, is one of the persons, that get more and more weak. He is near death, till Fisarek, the natural healer appears.He teaches Olda how he can resist this magic force and how he can fight it.Read More »