A German doctor tries to prove his theory that people are evolving to be taller by making a “superwoman” of his daughter thru diet, exercise, and conditioning to run in the Olympics. Unfortunately she doesnt turn into a homicidal monster like Barbara Carrera in “Embryo,” although she does get cranky.Read More »
Quote:
Out of the rain, and into the mausoleum — not the main characters, but Robert Altman, who, with this forbidding meditation on the Gothic thriller, slammed the Hollywood door shut in favor of art-house barricading. An early stirring of the budding American Renaissance, the picture is a conscious new beginning after the previous year’s botched studio experience with Countdown, and, as befits Altman’s expanding awareness of his own maverickdom, the focus of Richard Miles’ novel is moved from interior first-person to an outsider’s fragmented observation of disintegrating psyches. No Repulsion subjectivity here, only a clinically searching camera watching pinched, thirtyish bourgeois Sandy Dennis shanghaing hippie youth Michael Burns from the park bench and into her Vancouver home.Read More »
Last Train from Gun Hill is a 1959 Western by action director John Sturges. It stars Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Carolyn Jones and Earl Holliman. Douglas and Holliman had previously appeared together in Sturges’ Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which used much of the same crew.
The script is by James Poe, based on a story by Les Crutchfield. The film contains elements of High Noon, 3:10 to Yuma and Sturges’ own Bad Day at Black Rock.
summary:
The wife of marshal Matt Morgan is raped and murdered. The killers leave behind a distinctive saddle, that Morgan recognises as belonging to his old friend Craig Belden, now cattle baron in the town of Gun Hill. Belden is sympathetic, until it transpires that one of the murderers is his own son Rick, whom he refuses to hand over. Morgan is determined to capture Rick and take him away by the 9.00 train; but he is trapped in the town alone, with Belden and all his men now looking to kill him.Read More »
A 1969 film starring Kurt Russell, Cesar Romero, Joe Flynn and William Schallert. It was produced by Walt Disney Productions and distributed by Buena Vista Distribution Company as part of “The Last Laughs of the 1960s”.
It was one of several films made by Disney using the setting of Medfield College, first used in the 1961 Disney film The Absent-Minded Professor and its sequel Son of Flubber. Now You See Him Now You Don’t and The Strongest Man in the World, both sequels to The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, were also set at Medfield.
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Criterion wrote:
Astonishing Alpine location photography and a young Robert Redford in one of his earliest starring roles are just two of the visual splendors of Michael Ritchie’s visceral debut feature, Downhill Racer. In a beautifully understated performance, Redford is David Chappellet, a ruthlessly ambitious skier competing for Olympic gold with an underdog American team in Europe, and Gene Hackman provides tough support as the coach who tries to temper the upstart’s narcissistic drive for glory. With a subtle screenplay by acclaimed novelist James Salter, Downhill Racer is a vivid character portrait buoyed by breathtakingly fast and furious imagery that brings the viewer directly into the mind of the competitor.Read More »
An elderly artist thinks he has become too stale and is past his prime. His friend (and agent) persuades him to go to an offshore island to try once more. On the island he re-discovers his muse in the form of a young girl.
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Arlo Guthrie’s song is converted into a motion picture.
Arlo goes to see Alice for Thanksgivng and as a favor takes her trash to the dump. When the dump is closed, he drops it on top of another pile of garbage at the bottom of a ravine. When the local sheriff finds out a major manhunt begins. Arlo manages to survive the courtroom experience but it haunts him when he is to be inducted into the army via the draft. The movie follows the song with Arlo’s voice over as both music and narration.
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TCM Synopsis:
In varying degrees of undress, the chorus girls of the “Frolics of 1929” gossip that the show’s rich backer, brokerage head Craig Cutting, has “given the gate” to his mistress Aileen, one of the dancers, in preference to Antoinette “Tony” Landers, a dancer described as “a nice kid from a nice home.” As the girls chat, Tony is being seduced by her boyfriend, Bob North, the scion of a wealthy family, in the empty stadium at Yale, where he goes to college. Sometime later, as Tony prepares to go to her social debut at Craig’s party, Aileen confuses and upsets her with taunts about Craig’s “dividend checks” and “technique.” At the party, Tony learns that the dividend checks Craig has been giving her have not come, as she supposed, from the bonds her mother left her, but instead directly from Craig. She rebukes him for putting her in a position of obligation to him and refuses to succumb to his “technique” after he denies that he expects anything in return. Just then, Bob, whose suspicions have been fueled by Aileen, arrives and, after revealing that Tony is his wife, slaps her face with the cancelled checks, calls her a “dirty little tramp” and leaves. Tony confesses to Craig that she kept the marriage secret so that Bob would not be kicked out of college. When she asks Craig to help straighten out the situation, he refuses to interfere.
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synopsis
In this elliptical ensemble piece, which marks the directorial debut of indie bad boy Harmony Korine, the teens of tornado-scarred Xenia, OH, kill cats, tape their boobies, arm-wrestle, bathe, cross-dress, huff glue, avoid perverts, pay to have sex with retarded girls, lift makeshift dumbbells to the strains of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” fight, cuss, shave their eyebrows, undergo cancer treatment, euthanize senior citizens, and pee on passing cars. A hallucinatory barrage of images and scenarios with little in the way of traditional plot, Gummo has been variously described as a surrealist joke, a visual poem, and a worm’s-eye view of white-trash suffering. The main characters include Solomon (Jacob Reynolds), who sells cat carcasses to a middleman who procures them for use at a local Chinese restaurant; his mother (Linda Manz), who teaches him to tap dance while reminiscing about her dead husband; Tummler (Nick Sutton), a mullet-haired local sex symbol; a midget (Bryant L. Crenshaw); a pair of boy-crazy, bleach-blond sisters named Dot (Chloe Sevigny) and Helen (Carisa Bara); a slut with a lump in her breast (Lara Tosh); a group of drunken louts; and Bunny Boy (Jacob Sewell), who wanders the town enigmatically in a pair of long pink ears. In between scenes of these characters enacting their bizarre routines, Korine intersperses impressionistic and quasi-documentary scenes with voice-over narration that ranges from incest memoirs to arty dialogue along the lines of “He’s got what it takes to be a legend: He’s got a marvelous persona.” Shot just outside Nashville, TN, Gummo includes costume designs by Korine’s then-girlfriend, Chloe Sevigny, who also plays Dot and who previously starred in the Korine-scipted, Larry Clark-directed Kids. Jacob Reynolds would go on to appear in Getting to Know You, though few of the director’s other discoveries have appeared on film since.___by Brian J. DillardRead More »