As passions rise over Brexit many of the UK’s female MPs have received death threats and rape threats online. I struggled to comprehend the source of this tide of rage which seemed out of all proportion to a mere difference of political opinion. Then I watched this documentary about the online “incel” community and it all started to make a little more sense. “Incel” is short for, “involuntary celibate”, in other words, a guy who isn’t getting any sex.Read More »
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For his first studio picture, filth maestro John Waters took advantage of his biggest budget yet to allow his muse Divine to sink his teeth into a role unlike any he had played before: Baltimore housewife Francine Fishpaw, a heroine worthy of a Douglas Sirk melodrama. Blessed with a keen sense of smell and cursed with a philandering pornographer husband, a parasitic mother, and a pair of delinquent children, the long-suffering Francine turns to the bottle as her life falls apart—until deliverance appears in the form of a hunk named Todd Tomorrow (vintage heartthrob Tab Hunter). Enhanced with Odorama™ technology that enables you to scratch and sniff along with Francine, Polyester is one of Waters’ most hilarious inventions, replete with stomach-churning smells, sadistic nuns, AA meetings, and foot stomping galore.Read More »
This anthology helmed by four talented filmmakers, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Hiromichi Horikawa, and Roman Polanski, allows viewers to meet and observe four international con artists. Each story is set within a different city. “Amsterdam” follows the attempts of a seductive Dutch woman to entice an elderly man into buying her an expensive necklace in exchange for sex. He does, and she immediately runs away and uses the bauble, not realizing that it is worth a fortune, to purchase a parrot. In “Paris,” a con man sells a tourist rube the Eiffel Tower.Read More »
In the countryside near Normandy’s beaches lives Marie, unhappy. It’s 1944, she’s married to Jérôme, a somewhat fussy milquetoast, diffident to the war around him and unwilling to move his wife to Paris, where she longs to live, shop, and party. A German outfit is bivouacked at Jérôme and Marie’s crumbling château because its commanding officer is pursuing Marie. She’s also eyed by a French spy working with the Allies as they plan D-Day. He woos her (posing to the Germans as her brother) and, in his passion, forgets his mission. Heroics come from an unexpected direction, and Marie makes her choice.Read More »
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Mr. Ogata lives a complicated life: he is a pornographer making two skin flicks per day and trying to stay beneath the radar screen of the local mob; he deeply loves his ailing wife Haru who’s cursed by the restless spirit of her dead first husband; he also has a mistress, a step-son who wants to go to university, and a step-daughter entering adolescence. He lusts after his step-daughter, and when Haru finds out about those sexual advances, she asks him to marry the girl. Haru even signs over her business to him, and a crisis ensues when Ogata uses her nest egg to buy equipment so he and his pals can set up their own film processing lab. Surreal images and events weave their way into Ogata’s life.Read More »
The truthful soldier Stirling didn’t know how to lie about his source of information, the talking army Mule, Francis, so he was treated as a lunatic and led to one after another hilarious situations, where the mule was the only one that appeared in his right mind. In the process of all this, the mule assisted in uncovering a spy, Mareen, who pretended to be lost among the jungles, but was actually…Read More »
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Moya lyubov (My Love) is the latest breathtaking animation by Aleksandr Petrov, using his conventional technique of paint-on-glass, a very painstaking and time consuming technique (Moya Lyubov took 5 years to make) but also a very rewarding one, always a visual treat. Based on “A Love Story” (1927) by Ivan Shmelyov, it tells the story of Anton, a sixteen year old high-school student, high on romanticism and heroism, searching for his beloved, to whom he’ll give his first feelings.Read More »
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The film takes place in postwar Japan, following a Japanese clan through their wedding and funeral ceremonies, and the lengths the family goes to preserve their traditions in spite of the damage it causes to the younger generations.Read More »
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Karel Kachyna’s 1970 The Ear is a harrowing tale that interweaves marital discord and surveillance paranoia. With its portrait of a government functionary who spends a sleepless night wondering if he’ll be arrested before daybreak, it’s no wonder that The Ear had to wait until 1989 for its Czech premiere; the wonder is that it was made at all. The latter, at least, can be explained by the fact that Kachyna’s long-time collaborator, scenarist Jan Procházka, was a government official of some standing – which accounts, no doubt, for The Ear’s insider perspective, playing as it does with the couple’s knowledge of which rooms in their comfortable house are likely bugged and which aren’t.Read More »