USA

The movie seethes with conflict and bad blood – often unspoken. The conflicts arise over deeply felt divisions in social class, in gender and in generation, and result in unspoken accusations of callousness and cowardice, vanity and selfishness.

In many respects this is a movie of another time – these days, unless a family has a strong military tradition, I can imagine few families now enraged by a son’s expressed wish that a war could be won without his involvement, few families in which an employer would not draft a letter for his decades-long employee’s only child to keep him out of war – and even refuse to write a letter (for which his mother pleads) for his own beloved brother’s draft deferment.Read More »

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How Little We Know of Our Neighbours is an experimental documentary about Britain’s Mass Observation Movement and its relationship to contemporary issues regarding surveillance, public self-disclosure, and privacy. At its center is a look at the multiple roles cameras have played in public space, starting in the 1880’s, when the introduction of the hand-held camera brought photography out of the studio and into the street. For the first time one could be photographed casually in public without knowledge or consent. Mass Observation used surreptitious photography to record and scrutinize people’s behavior in public places. Mass Observation was an eccentric social science enterprise founded in the late 1930’s in England that combined surrealism with anthropology. Read More »

Synopsis
A soldier inaccurately reported as dead returns home to his Spanish family’s estate in California, only to find his father deceased and his ancestral land in the hands of strangers.Read More »

A look within the walls of the New York Public Library.

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The director’s latest magisterial study of a public institution is a tribute to the power of education and the importance of community, characteristically ambitious yet surprisingly brisk.

Patience is a virtue; it is also a lion. One hundred and sixteen years old, the white marble beast has guarded the steps outside the main branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL) with her identical counterpart, Fortitude. The principles they embody have sustained Frederick Wiseman across the half-century of his unique career, which arguably culminates in this, his 42nd documentary film. A quietly magisterial enterprise, over the course of 197 minutes it visits the myriad buildings and activities which serve the city under the NYPL’s banner and lion-head logo.Read More »

— Jonas Mekas wrote:
“The film consists of three parts. The first part is made up of footage I shot with my first Bolex, during my first years in America, mostly from 1950-1953. It shows me and my brother Adolfas, how we looked in those days; miscellaneous footage of immigrants in Brooklyn, picnicking, dancing, singing; the streets of Williamsburg.

— Jonas Mekas wrote:
“The second part was shot in August 1971, in Lithuania. Almost all of the footage comes from Semeniškiai, the village I was born in. You see the old house, my mother (born 1887), all the brothers, goofing, celebrating our homecoming. You don’t really see how Lithuania is today: you see it only through the memories of a Displaced Person back home for the first time in twenty-five years.Read More »

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The Wet Ones is like The Mr. Bill Show on crack, and that is entirely on purpose. Using the tagline “a movie made by maniacs, for maniacs,” this psychedelic, action figure starring, splatterfest more than lives up to it. It is written and directed by musician/filmmaker Wigwolf, who plays guitar while wearing a werewolf mask, long, flowing wig, and a tutu. It features homemade sets with hand-mutilated dolls having adventures and stabbing each other in the p***y.
One doll featured prominently has a red shock wig and an enormous hard-on and goes by Doctor AIDS (Wigwolf). It also has a Katy Perry doll that gets into all sorts of peril. Her adventures include being attacked by one of the sisters from Jack Hill’s Spider Baby (Rachel Alig) before fighting against the evil corporate influence of Titanic Sinclair. There is also Bunnula the vampire rabbit, Elvis at the disco (Morris Slater Diamond), Joan of Arc (Lauren Barrett), and J.R. Jickenjacker (Jamie Robert MacDougall).Read More »

PLOT SUMMARY
from IMDB user review
Straight-laced San Francisco doctor and wonderful family man Richard Talbot (Kent Smith), has never done anything more serious in his life then being late at his doctors office. That was all to change when one evening going to his car, he runs into singer Nora Prentiss (Ann Sheridan).Read More »

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The film was shot in live-action, then adapted with rotoscope animation. That process creates realistic scenes of Chinatown — from the lion dance in the Chinese New Year’s parade to senior citizens performing tai chi in Columbus Park to the neighborhood’s open air markets. The shots of the corners, nooks and crannies throughout Chinatown are instantly recognizable to New Yorkers.Read More »

Plot:
It’s the New York Department of Weights and Measures vs. a systematic effort to cheat the public by giving them less product than they pay for…organized by crooked city alderman Marty Cavanaugh, who put the last chief deputy inspector in the hospital. The new man, pugnacious Johnny Cave, steps on the toes of influential merchants and gets increasing pressure, both political and strong-arm, to desist. Will the luck (if not the pluck) of the Irish pull him through?Read More »