So-called ‘pre-Code’ films remain among the most interesting ever made in America. This 67-minute documentary from Warner Bros enlists a wide range of film historians and commentators – among them Leonard Maltin, Camille Paglia, John Landis, Jeffrey Vance, and Molly Haskell – to discuss the movies of the era and explore what allowed them to break sexual and social taboos, why the Hays Code was drawn up, and the changes that came in its wake.Read More »
Quote:
When a Russian musician defects in Bloomingdale’s department store in New York, he finds adjusting to American life more difficult than he imagined.Read More »
Quote:
Shu Lea Cheang’s witty narrative Fresh Kill envisions a post-apocalyptic landscape strewn with electronic detritus and suffering the toxic repercussions of mass marketing in a high-tech commodity culture.
“Fresh Kill’s title refers to a fictitious landfill that dominates Staten Island. Junk rules many of the film’s compositions, and, thematically, the film revolves around the detritus of an urban consumer society in which transnational corporations bring raw materials from the Third World, contaminating goods and people in the process, and dump them in the borough. Fresh Kill makes sense out of this refuse by exploring connections among people on the edges of corporate capitalism and off-center in a white, bourgeois, heterosexual world. Read More »
Quote:
Could an amnesiac refugee named Anna Anderson (Ingrid Bergman) truly be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, purported sole survivor of the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1918, and therefore the rightful heir to the Czar’s fortune? Backed by a group of White Russian exiles led by General Bounine (Yul Brynner), she faces her possible grandmother, the imperious Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (Helen Hayes), and the fortune-hunting Prince Paul (Ivan Desny).Read More »
A few unusual characters and their unconventional therapists cross paths resulting in hilarious interactions.Read More »
Quote:
The final film of “Elective Affinities”. A central element is a documentary film about paranoid conditions. Another is a flow of images of an apple tree in my back yard filmed impulsively, without forethought, the opposite of the static camera of FOG LINE. The radical breaking with the previous passivity of the camera has deep psychological dimensions. That was the first thing that led me to bring the paranoid material into the zone of the tree footage. The elements of sound and image are closely matched to each other, frame by frame. Inserted in them at the heart of the film are images of children, Kenneth and Louise, from an instructional documentary about the seasons. Cries of cattle being auctioned and sent to the stockyards are also inserted. Read More »
A letter is addressed to three wives from their “best friend” Addie Ross, announcing that she is running away with one of their husbands–but she doesn’t say which one.Read More »
Synopsis:
Selina lived well until her father Simeon died. Her aunts sold the estate and put her in a boarding school. As an adult she wants to be a teacher in farming country. She falls in love with and marries Pervus, a Dutch farmer she has been tutoring. When he dies her hopes lie with their son Dirk, who disappoints her by giving up architecture for stock brokerage. Her new hope is Roelfe, the son of her former boardinghouse keeper and a sculptor. Dirk falls in love with Dallas O’Mara, whom Selina hopes will be the inspiration for her son’s salvation.Read More »
