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“A pushy, narcissistic filmmaker persuades a Phoenix family to let him and his crew film their everyday lives, in the manner of the ground-breaking PBS series ‘An American Family’. However, instead of remaining unobtrusive and letting the family be themselves, he can’t help himself from trying to control every facet of their lives ‘for the good of the show’.”Read More »
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One of the great raconteurs of stage and screen, Spalding Gray, came together with one of cinema’s boldest image-makers, Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh, for Gray’s Anatomy, a spellbinding adaptation of Gray’s 1993 monologue of the same name (cowritten with Renée Shafransky). In it, Gray, with typical sardonic relish, chronicles his arduous journey through the diagnosis and treatment of a rare and alarming ocular condition. For the monologist, this experience occasioned a meditation on illness and mortality, medicine and metaphysics; for the filmmaker, it was a chance to experiment with ways of bringing his subject’s words to brilliant, eye-opening life.Read More »
Stubborn detective Tom Mackey, assigned to a Los Angeles murder case involving a couple of serial killings, gets increasingly frustrated with the dead end leads he’s following and the lack of appreciation he gets from his chief, police captain Keller. Enter Dr. Sally Powers, a fresh, clean cut psychology graduate who possesses supernatural powers. In a loose partnership the twosome gradually succeed in unraveling the killer’s motive and working-pattern.Read More »
AMG: This lightweight, nearly zero-gravity comedy by director Henry Levin relies on a novel by a male writer and a script by another man to come up with a nearly offensive story (in these more enlightened times) about how a woman can lie, manipulate, and generally deceive her husband, all in the “art” of hanging on to him. Sandra Dee is Chantal, married to Eugene (Bobby Darin, Dee’s real-life husband), but first comes the story of how she hooked him. Next, comes the story of how he is trained to be a perfect husband, and then the final installment is unveiled. She uses a variety of tricks to keep him wondering whether or not he can trust her. For example, Chantal’s mother calls her and “if a man answers” she hangs up, leaving the unhappy husband to think his wife has a clandestine lover. The premise that a woman’s only role in life is to get and hold a husband has thankfully undergone a few revisions since 1962.Read More »
The story centers on a married American couple who go to the San Sebastian Film Festival and get caught up in the magic of the event, the beauty and charm of Spain and the fantasy of movies. She has an affair with a brilliant French movie director, and he falls in love with a beautiful Spanish woman who lives there.Read More »
Commitment phobic Morgan and her ex-girlfriend Jean, locally famous true crime podcasters, suspect Morgan’s new love interest is a murderer.Read More »
A beat vagabond traverses San Francisco’s deepest nooks and crannies, spreading about a peculiar brand of wisdom and lollygagging.Read More »
This is one of the worst Columbia science fiction serials. That said, it does have a couple of interesting qualities. First, it has some very unusual cliff hangers, but there’s no set up that allows you to guess ‘How do they get out of it?’ Almost every one is a cheat, with Captain Video pulling out a new secret gadget to neutralize the terror, or Gallagher (Don C. Harvey, usually a ‘henchman’ in other serials and movies) in the Control Room twirling dials and flipping switches to save our heroes. When a fire in a well fails to burn them, Captain Video explains that it’s because human bodies from Earth react differently to the atmosphere of Theros. But there’s only one ‘jump out of the car before it explodes / goes over the cliff’ cliff hanger! As usual, it’s the stirring narration by Knox Manning at the end of each episode that teases you into wanting to watch the next chapter.Read More »
A strong-willed graduate student in theatre (Josephine Decker) directs a group of fresh-faced undergraduate actors in an adaptation of a gothic 80s young adult novel, a process that alters them all in unexpected ways. The arrival of the book’s author (Austin Pendleton) only furthers the ensemble’s journey into the very personal, very real origins of narrative.Read More »