Queer Cinema(s)

Chain Letters is Rappaport’s most deliciously lush and Byzantine work, It poses a mystery, but while most mysteries want us to dive down and excavate secrets, Rappaport insists that we ice skate the fractured, opaque surfaces. Strange puzzles, symmetries, and coincidences abound. Doppelgangers and mirror-image anti-types lurk around every corner. But you would have to be paranoid to try to connect the dots. Or would you? Could there be a key that unlocks the mysteries of life? Or is that the real mystery? Can you break the chains of code? One character in the film believes all of life is a plot orchestrated by a vast government bureaucracy, but Rappaport tells us that the bureaucracy of the imagination puts that of the Pentagon to shame. The real plots are in our brains–the plots that form the haunted graveyard of Western civilization.”Read More »

Schroeter set out to make a film about Marilyn Monroe ten years after her death as a meditation on the new feminism in America. The result was this bizarre chamber melodrama about three women who turn an abandoned shack in the Mojave Desert into a kind of Charles Manson commune. The three lure men to their lair, force them to have sex, then rob and murder them. With a music track that includes Bizet, Yugoslavian folk tunes, the Andrews Sisters and the Blue Ridge Rangers, Schroeter fashions a spectacle of female power which critics have compared to Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Altman’s Three Women.

– San Francisco CinemathequeRead More »

Synopsis:
Police commissioner Santamaria is investigating the murdering of the ambiguous architect Mr. Garrone. The investigations soon drive him into the Torino’s high society. Santamaria suspect Anna Carla and at the same time falls in love for her. Lello is the lover of Massimo, a homosexual platonic friend of Anna Carla. He is following another direction in order to find out the truth, and his results are confusing the Policeman. But another murdering happens…Read More »

Three teenagers are shaken up by their first loves in the turmoil of their youth. At a time when others are conforming, they stand their ground and assert their right to love and be free.Read More »

Quote:
A Colombian writer returns to his native Medellín to mourn his lost youth and, while he’s at it, pick up a new one. That, more or less, is the tale that Barbet Schroeder’s new movie has to tell. Schroeder has made some spicy pictures in his time, but this one feels lacklustre by comparison, and the two main performers-Anderson Ballesteros as the hustler and German Jaramillo as his aging mentor-tend to drift through their scenes, trying not to notice the hellfire around them. Whether they are genuinely ground down by the woes of the world or simply exhausted by years of casual sex is hard to work out; to be fair, few directors could make a film about moral anesthesia without sinking into glumness, and Schroeder does a pretty good job of insuring that no one in the audience will book a Colombian vacation in the near future.Read More »

Quote:
Reiko is a sex robot programmed to accumulate sexual experience. She goes through seven body types to experiences a variety of couplings. She returns to the company to download her accumulated info and escape from their control.Read More »

Synopsis:
Pregnant nineteen-year old Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker) is sentenced to prison as an accessory to robbery. The warden, Ruth Benton (Agnes Moorehead), dedicated to reforming even the most hardened of the prisoners, deals fairly with Marie, even upon learning of her condition. The naïve Marie comes up against tough block matron Evelyn Harper (Hope Emerson) and must decide whether accepting the friendship of the toughest prisoners will rub off on her and affect the future of her unborn child.Read More »

Quote:
For his first studio picture, filth maestro John Waters took advantage of his biggest budget yet to allow his muse Divine to sink his teeth into a role unlike any he had played before: Baltimore housewife Francine Fishpaw, a heroine worthy of a Douglas Sirk melodrama. Blessed with a keen sense of smell and cursed with a philandering pornographer husband, a parasitic mother, and a pair of delinquent children, the long-suffering Francine turns to the bottle as her life falls apart—until deliverance appears in the form of a hunk named Todd Tomorrow (vintage heartthrob Tab Hunter). Enhanced with Odorama™ technology that enables you to scratch and sniff along with Francine, Polyester is one of Waters’ most hilarious inventions, replete with stomach-churning smells, sadistic nuns, AA meetings, and foot stomping galore.Read More »

Based on a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, City and the Dogs is set in a brutal boys` military academy. Juan Manuel Ochoa plays a tough young cadet who rules a student clique called The Circle, which supplies the other boys with forbidden cigarettes, booze and pornography, and even provides answers to upcoming tests. When Ochoa is caught, he places blame on Eduardo Adriazen, the weakest member of the Circle. Adriazen informs on Ochoa, who subsequently kills him. During the investigation of Adriazen’s death, the academy tries to cover up the crime lest the institution be destroyed by the scandal. The principal whistle-blower, a sensitive young “outsider” (Pablo Serra), is himself discredited because it is he who has been writing the pornography that Ochoa has been selling.Read More »