Jad and David Fair are Half Japanese, “The World’s Greatest Underground Band” and the most unlikely pair of rock heroes as can be imagined. Half Japanese play their hearts out on rooftops and nursing home back porches while overzealous fans and rock critics plot the next Beatlemania that never comes. A conspiracy of the Corporate Rock world? Perhaps.Read More »
A strange man known only as the “metal fetishist”, who seems to have an insane compulsion to stick scrap metal into his body, is hit and possibly killed by a Japanese “salaryman”, out for a drive with his girlfriend. The salaryman then notices that he is being slowly overtaken by some kind of disease that is turning his body into scrap metal, and that his nemesis is not in fact dead but is somehow masterminding and guiding his rage and frustration-fueled transformation.Read More »
In June 1980, (Eric) Mitchell released a sixteen-millimeter feature that was specifically designed to be shown at midnight and was called Underground U.S.A. More Morrissey than Warhol (with a cameo appearance by Taylor Mead), the film is Sunset Boulevard out of Heat, transposed to no-wave haute monde. The Gloria Swanson character, here a faded underground underground superstar obviously modeled on Edie Segdwick, is played with convincing self-absorption by platinum-haired Patti Astor, another Poe graduate. Mitchell, whose emotional affect makes Joe Dallesandro seem like a Jack Lemmon hysteric, is the hustler who manages to briefly install himself in her foredoomed life; while, in a witty bit of casting, Factory juvenile René Ricard enacts the von Stroheim-like protector whom Mitchell nudges aside but fails to replace. Underground U.S.A. is well acted and handsomely shot, but never redeems the comic potential of its first twenty minutes, inexorably going vague over the punk-underground art-world milieu that it sets out to lampoon. Nevertheless, due in large part to Mitchell’s skill as a self-promoter, the film ran at midnight for twenty weekends at the St. Marks until midnight October 1980.
J. Hoberman, Midnight MoviesRead More »
Driven around Paris by a loyal driver (Édith Scob), a mysterious man (Denis Lavant) dresses up in costumes and plays a number of strange, semiscripted roles.
Manohla Dargis wrote:
“Holy Motors,” from the French filmmaker Leos Carax, is a dream of the movies that looks like a movie of dreams. It is a reverie that begins, appropriately, with a seated audience waiting in the dark (like us) and then cuts to a dimly lighted room, where a man (Mr. Carax) rises from a bed that he shares with a dog. He lets the sleeping dog lie (no need for trouble just yet) and creeps over to a mysterious door hidden in a wall. With a strange metal key that’s apparently grafted to one of his fingers, he unlocks the door and — like Little Nemo tumbling into Slumberland, Dorothy crossing over the rainbow and Alice falling down the rabbit hole — leaves one world for another.Read More »
Quote:
The first part of Stefan Jarls Mods trilogy. The films depict the story of Kenta and Stoffe, but at the same time tells the story of Swedish society between the years 1968 and 1993. In Dom kallar oss mods, we meet Kenta and Stoffe, two boys in their upper teens hanging out at T-Centralen in Stockholm, they have set themselves outside the community and deny those on their way to their jobs. They drink beer, smoke hash, meet girls and plan one day at a time.Read More »
A hobo works and wanders, a tramp dreams and wanders, and a bum drinks and wanders.
Irish director John T Davis stashes a camera in his bedroll, catches out, and rides the rails from Minneapolis to Seattle with Beargrease, a part-time hobo and full time philosopher, who narrates their way through the incredible scenery of the Northwest and gives us his views on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The pair meet up several other men living life on the margins: in particular a scene in which Duffy – an ex-corporate executive now living under a bridge in Spokane & collecting cans – describes how he got there is riveting.
Hobo is an American classic. I think is sums up what is wrong at times with the US and what makes the US great all at the same time.Read More »
Synopsis:
A naively honorable samurai (played by Raizo) comes to the bitter realization that his devotion to moral samurai principles makes him an oddity among his peers, and a very vulnerable oddity in consequence. He takes the blame for the misdeeds of others, with the understanding that he will be exiled for one year and restored to the clan’s good graces after the political situation dies down. As betrayal begins to heap upon betrayal, he realizes he’ll have to live out his life as a master-less ronin, if not hunted down and killed.
— Letterboxd.Read More »
An obscure gem, a hidden treasure to international cinema lovers; “Sevmek Zamani” is one of the best movies in Turkish cinema history. This cult film still remains as a cinematic enigma for the new generation in Turkey. Praised for its B&W cinematograhpy and regarded as a masterpiece, film follows the aesthetic tradition of Antoninoni. Also resembles some of Bela Tarr’s works with its visual sensibility; “Sevmek Zamani” is an eclectic mixture of modernist themes (i.e. individual loneliness), metaphysics (the fight of good vs evil), and notions of Marxism like director’s some other works. Metin Erksan is one of the first Turkish filmmakers who saw cinema as an art form apart from a mass entertaining medium.
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Soup’ Dreams
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
Essentially a retread of The Freshman (1990) on a much lower budget, In the Soup concerns a young wannabe filmmaker, Adolfo Rollo (Steve Buscemi) who becomes mixed up with a gangster-type, Joe (Seymour Cassell) in the name of financing his first film.
Very little filmmaking occurs, though. What really happens is the old story of the life-loving older guy teaching the high-strung younger fellow a thing or two about living.
Yes, it’s an old story that has been told a thousand times before and since, but Alexandre Rockwell’s little film has a home movie charm and a streetwise wit that make it a must-see sleeper.Read More »