While on his daily route as the driver of the local school bus, Michio Nishiumi sees his own infant son kidnapped from the vehicle by a masked assailant with a gun. A ransom is demanded, but the boy dies. Michio wants and needs his revenge.Read More »
THE GEORGETOWN LOOP
(Ken Jacobs, 1996, 11m, widescreen 35mm film, black and white, silent)
Originally photographed in 1903, US Library of Congress collection. New arrangement in 1996 by Ken Jacobs, assisted by Florence Jacobs. 35mm optical rephotography by Sam Bush, Western Cine, Denver.
I’ve been raiding the Paper Print Collection of the Library Of Congress in Washington, DC, since the late 1960s with TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON. It’s a preserve of early cinema. Until 1912, in order to copyright film, one deposited with the library a positive from the negative printed on paper, unprojectable, but – unlike nitrate prints – capable of weathering the years without Crumbling into chemical volatility. And there the stacks rested, safely out of mind, hundreds and hundreds of silent rolls most less than 30 meters, many Edisons, American Mutoscope And Biograph, Gaumont, Lubin, Vitagraph ; cine-snatches of life as it was lived, vaudevillians, proto-dramas, and too many state parades.Read More »
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Born unlucky, a victim of the errors and distortions of Stalinism, he is released in 1956. He meets a politically feverish woman, her influential parents, and finally becomes the father of her child. But bad luck, or perhaps an unlucky era, will not let him forget.Read More »
From RaiPlay:
“L’uomo dal Fiore in Bocca”, a single act by Luigi Pirandello staged for the first time in 1922, is one of the most intense plays by the great Nobel prize-winning playwright. It’s a dialogue at a coffee station between a man with a tumor and a dull and indifferent customer. The director of this difficult television adaptation of 1993 of the play by Pirandello is Marco Bellocchio, while the protagonist is Michele Placido, flanked by Antonino Bellomo.Read More »
In Painter, McCarthy, decked out in a blonde wig, a bulbous drinker’s nose, and giant latex hands, staggers around a small, wood-paneled studio with an immense paint brush, yammering things like, “I can’t do it, I can’t do it,” and, “DeKooning, DeKooning, DeKooning.” He punctures the sides of gigantesque tubes of paint (one is labeled “Shit”), mixes the paint, then slashes and hacks big crude Expressionist swaths onto canvases with crazy electric blue and orange grounds. During the course of the video, he meanders between adjoining rooms ranting against his dealer, sitting in on an absurd conversation with pretentious, bulbous-nosed scholars, has a sycophantic collector sniff his asshole, and chops off his own fingers with a cleaver. Painter is a hilarious satire of inflated Abstract Expressionists and the art world in general, but it is not only that. When McCarthy obsessively mixes his gallons of shit-brown paint, loads up his brush, and, grunting and waving, goes to his canvas, he is pointing towards something important: that paint is the same as shit and dirt—just unruly filth that flows and stains. That finally, the hopeless drive to make art is drunken, humiliated, violent, sexual and infantile, perhaps tragic as well. (Brooklyn Rail)Read More »
Based on actual events. Brandon Teena is the popular new guy in a tiny Nebraska town. He hangs out with the guys, drinking, cussing, and bumper surfing, and he charms the young women, who’ve never met a more sensitive and considerate young man. Life is good for Brandon, now that he’s one of the guys and dating hometown beauty Lana. However, he’s forgotten to mention one important detail. It’s not that he’s wanted in another town for GTA and other assorted crimes, but that Brandon Teena was actually born a woman named Teena Brandon. When his best friends make this discovery, Brandon’s life is ripped apart by betrayal, humiliation, rape, and murder.Read More »
After laying bare backward village mentalities in Bloody Morning, Li Shaohong turns her attention to China’s urban middle class. Cao is a photographer, married to an opera singer and with an infant son, caught in the usual professional morass of political compromise. His life starts to fall apart when he learns that his ex-wife also bore him a son some months after their divorce – and when the boy turns up looking for his father. Nothing wildly dramatic, just believable people in believable situations. If the ending seems a touch forced, this is nevertheless a sign that ‘Fifth Generation’ cinema is changing and coming to terms with up-to-date realities.Read More »
Quote: They said strange things happened around her. They said she was dangerous. They said she was a demon. Now naive little Izumi is about to uncover the truth behind her life of lies…Read More »
Quote: College life getting you down? Switch to Seika College where the students are getting a whole new lesson in sexual education! Michiru’s classes were dull and boring until her classmates, Chie, Saori and Takeru, started taking extra classes at a new night school. Utilizing subliminal messaging, the school helps their students ace their daytime college exams. Unfortunately, the school’s professor forgot to mention the process has a few sexual side effects…Read More »