Johnny Lamb (Brendan Fraser) has two jobs: he’s an elevator operator by day and a hit man by night and he’s very good at both jobs. His Boss (Peter Coyote) sends him on a job that makes Lamb confront his conscience; maybe for the first time. The episode has gay relationship overtones seldom touched in hard-boiled novels nor found in film noir.Read More »
Steven Soderbergh mixes Siodmak’s 1946 and Siegel’s 1964 The Killers
with wide selection of musical numbers “when presented with the challenge of delivering
some audio/visual material for a series of events organized in LA “Read More »
Synopsis wrote:
“The sub-personalities of me, as baby, athlete, witch and artist are synthesized in this film of superimpositions, intensities, and color layers coming together through the powers of film.” — Barbara HammerRead More »
Quote:
Jonas Mekas, the godfather of American “underground” cinema, shot literally miles of impromptu film on a tiny, touch-and-go Bolex camera before assembling his first “diary film” and screening it before an audience of friends and fellow indie artists in 1969. At that point the home-movie ethos was somewhat less than groundbreaking, but a glance at what Mekas’s contemporaries were working on or releasing at the time—Kenneth Anger was ensconced in off-and-on production for Lucifer Rising, Stan Brakhage was toiling on the 8mm Songs cycle, and Paul Morrissey had just morphed the Warhol aesthetic into the zeitgeist-preaching Flesh—suggests just how perpendicular his project stood in relation to the remainder of the bicoastal art-house scene. Read More »
Synopsis wrote:
In her first feature, after decades as a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Barbara Hammer weaves striking images of four contemporary gay and lesbian couples with footage of an unearthed, forbidden, and invisible history, searching eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of queer culture. Questions of historic representation are examined through addressing the margins, between-the-line readings, and images outside of prescribed textual boundaries. Archival footage from Lot In Sodom (1933), often regarded as the first queer film made in the United States, as well as footage from German narrative and documentary films of the thirties, are interwoven with contemporary footage in this multi-faceted, haunting documentary.Read More »
Synopsis
Stanley’s attempts to treat Oliver’s cold include dropping a swab down his friend’s throat, applying a mustard plaster to his rump, and inflating the air mattress from the gas jet until it has Oliver pressed against the ceiling.Read More »
Take a Chance was based on the hit Broadway musical of the same name, though only one
of the original songs, Eadie Was a Lady, has been retained. The thinnish plot involves the
misadventures of a pair of pickpockets, played on Broadway by Jack Haley and Sid Silvers
and on film by James Dunn and Cliff “Ukelele Ike” Edwards. Tired of fleecing the suckers in
a traveling carnival, our heroes head to Broadway, where they get mixed up with gangsters.
The soubrette role originally played on stage by Ethel Merman is herein essayed by Lillian
Roth, hardly a fair trade. Billed last in the huge cast is Marjorie Main, 15 years before
stepping into her trademark role as Ma Kettle.Read More »
Leslie Thornton’s remarkable, mind-boggling experimental feature-length cycle of short films which she’s been working on and releasing in episodes since 1981 is a postapocalyptic narrative about two children feeling their way through the refuse of late-20th-century consumer culture; the films employ a wide array of found footage as well as peculiar, unpredictable, and often funny performances from two “found” actors. Apart from one startling and beautiful color shot in the penultimate episode, Whirling, the whole cycle is in black and white. (Episodes that have been added since an earlier version of the cycle showed in Chicago six years ago include Introduction to the So-Called Duck Factory and The Problem So Far.) Highly idiosyncratic and deeply creepy, this series as a whole – which includes passages in both film and video, sometimes shown concurrently – represents the most exciting recent work in the American avant-garde, a saga that raises questions about everything while making everything seem very strange.
– Jonathan RosenbaumRead More »
Synopsis wrote:
“I picked up Stan and Jane Brakhage at the airport and drove them to San Francisco State College where Stan spoke about his films to the student body. I was fascinated with Jane. She was so interested in the world around her while Stan seemed caught up only in his ideas. She picked seed pods from trees and plants and told me she had written a lexicon of dog language. She was so much more complex than Stan’s portrayal of her in Window Water Baby Moving (1958) that I decided to make a documentary about her for my graduate project.” — Barbara HammerRead More »