Letterboxd review by Wilson ★★★★½
Bernard Rose is an interesting filmmaker, with a strange obsession for adapting Leo Tolstoy. ivans xtc. is his version of the Tolstoy novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Rose has directed another four Tolstoy adaptations, as far as I can see (pretty sure Leo didn’t have a short story about Candyman…), he has also made Anna Karenina (1997), The Kreutzer Sonata, Two Jacks and Boxing Day.

Rose takes the Tolstoy stories and updates them to the modern day, often setting them in sleazy Hollywood. He casts Danny Huston and lets rip.

ivans xtc. is a really full throttle Hollywood satire. It is a sleazy, sordid 90 minutes. The kind of film where Peter Weller snorts cocaine off Danny Huston’s wife, “2 milimetres from her pussy” as the film would have it. Rose pulls no punches with Hollywood, while keeping his literary precision.

He scores the film with a cold, classical soundscape; while swerving into the satire by casting Tiffani Thiessen and Victoria Silvstedt, as strange versions of their own public personas.

The film is probably most notable for its incredibly low-grade digital photography, that adds to its grimey appearance. It deliberately looks terrible, which just adds to the film.

However, in the end, this film belongs to Danny Huston. Huston manically stumbles around the film, delivering a masterclass in charisma. Huston plays a Hollywood agent, with snake-oil charm, a huge grin and dead eyes and an unending love of consumption. Yet the film works because it opens with his death, the reactions to his death, then spins backwards into his last weekend, of parties, and drugs and sex.

It is like the louche Ikiru.

Yet, despite the level of unlikeable debauchery, Rose and Huston makes the film an emotionally resonant work. Where you feel deeply by the end of the 90 minutes for main character.

ivans xtc. is one of the most neglected great films of the last 15 years. A brutal satire, a great literary adaptation, a stunning performance; a debauched, sexy, drama, that ends up as a really melancholic character study.

Ivansxtc.AKA.Ivans.xtc.2000.576p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

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Runtime: 	1 h 32 min
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Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Bernard Rose – Ivansxtc AKA Ivans xtc. (To Live and Die in Hollywood) (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

One of those movies that reminds you of “Alien” and “The Thing” (not the original). The story is simple yet convincing and the special effects were good for its time. There is a little humor though not much. Most of the time it ranges from serious to dead serious. A group of underwater explorers uncover an old Russian submarine called appropriately enough “Leviathan” which translates from an ancient term meaning “sea monster” in the bible. They search the sub and find nothing of interest except a flask of vodka. However, one crew members becomes ill from drinking it and others join him. It appears that something has overtaken the unlucky Leviathan crew and they are next. It was all in all a clever film if not anti-climactic. Worth seeing surely.

Leviathan.1989.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 37 min
Size: 	2.34 GiB
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https://nitro.download/view/D1590D8AA9C68E9/Leviathan.1989.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post George P. Cosmatos – Leviathan (1989) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Firstborn (1984)

A teen must protect his family when his mother’s sinister new boyfriend begins exerting his authority in their home.

Letterboxd reviews
★★★½ Rewatched by Tim Daugherty 16 Sep 2019

I’ve always thought this was an under-rated gem from the 80’s. Firstborn certainly had 80’s flair (not least of all the music), but it also had its own style about it. Mostly understated – and not as exuberant as its peers.

Of course Peter Weller is fantastic, and Terri Garr is believable as both a good mom and a “Coke head”. Is it weird to say this might be Corey Haim’s best performance? The fact Robert Downey Jr. is in this, it’s 1984, and he is NOT the coke addict is hilarious.

What I don’t love is the cheesy action sequence and all-to-clean ending. It’s the stuff of Hallmark Drama TV. Forgivable. It came with the territory back then. Less forgivable, and what prevents this from flirting with being really special, is that I hate the character of Jake. Not the actor, but the character. He just isn’t likable, and comes off as a know-it-all jerk. Everyone around him is made to seem like an obstacle to his magnificent moral compass. His mom, Dad, the new boyfriend, his brother, girlfriend, the teacher, coach, etc…..no one is quite as enlightened as Jake. Even the films title and movie poster reinforces this for some reason. I kind of think this should’ve been “Second-born”

I cheered a little when Weller gives him a right hook to the head. I suspect that wasn’t the intent.

2.50GB | 1h 40m | 1022×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/EBC0D7407ED26DA/Firstborn.AKA.Moving.In.1984.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Michael Apted – Firstborn AKA Moving In (1984) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Plot
A crooked cop tries to stick up a drug dealer in Central Park, and is shot dead. The drug dealer is brought to trial, but Weller becomes convinced that he didn’t fire first, and that the incident is the tip of an iceberg of corruption in the police department. His friend Elliott becomes convinced of the same thing, and together they work inside and outside the law to help the defendant beat a murder rap and expose other corrupt cops. Weller has some nice moments in the courtroom, although his legal style is so informal and disorganized it’s hard to believe

700MB | 1h 36m | 608×336 | avi

https://nitroflare.com/view/7F6646FF38A2C21/Shakedown.Glickenhaus.1988.DVDRip.XVid.MP3.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post James Glickenhaus – Shakedown (1988) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

This low-key, well-acted, underrated and pitch-black comedy didn’t get the recognition it deserved upon it’s (limited) release in 1994, even with director Michael Tolkin’s stature as screenwriter of ‘The Player’ and his freaky directorial debut with ‘The Rapture’. Peter Weller and Judy Davis play wealthy but spirtually bereft professionals in LA who decide to ditch their previous lives and open a store. It goes badly rather quickly. Watch for Adam West, perfectly cast as Peter Weller’s hipster father.

1.32GB | 1 h 53 min | 680×436 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/3A567CA4B49890F/The_New_age_94.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English (muxed)

The post Michael Tolkin – The New Age (1994) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

(SIRIUS 6B, Year 2078) On a distant mining planet ravaged by a decade of war, scientists have created the perfect weapon: a blade-wielding, self-replicating race of killing devices known as Screamers designed for one purpose only — to hunt down and destroy all enemy life forms But man’s greatest weapon has continued to evolve without any human guidance, and now it has devised a new mission: to obliterate all life. Col. Hendricksson (Peter Weller) is commander of a handful of Alliance soldiers still alive on Sirius 6B. Betrayed by his own political leaders and disgusted by the atrocities of this never-ending war, Hendricksson decides he must negotiate a separate peace with the New Economic Bloc’s decimated forces. But to do so, he will have to cross a treacherous wasteland where the deadliest threat comes from the very weapons he helped to create.

6.56GB | 1 h 48 min | 1280×720 | mkv

http://nitroflare.com/view/8A6B0708683A9F3/Screamers.1995.720p.BluRay.X264-AMIABLE.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Christian Duguay – Screamers (1995) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

p>Review from Washington Post in January 1992…

Quote:

Someone asked the other day if David Cronenberg’s movie adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s novel “Naked Lunch” was “digital or analog.” In other words, does the movie follow the author’s surrealistic, Rorschach-test prose unit for unit, or does he weave an analogous version of his own?
Cronenberg, definitely, opts for the latter. He does so to his own, very weird degree. This is the guy, after all, who made “Scanners,” “The Fly” and “Dead Ringers.” He enjoys the grotesque. He grooves on molecular mutation. So, picking up on Burroughs’s passing — and metaphorical — references to beetles or buglike beings, Cronenberg takes that thought and scuttles with it.
There are bugs all over this movie. They are big, disgusting, coleopterous beings with pincers, sheaths and mandibles. They show up in bars with exoskeletal nonchalance. They metamorphose out of typewriters. One of them claims to be a spy controller. They emit nauseating, appetite-destroying secretions.
Of course, the movie — set in a brown-tinted, out-there 1950s world — is filled with people too, most of them writers, drug addicts or both. The central character is Bill Lee (Peter Weller), a pest exterminator and former junkie whose job is to dust people’s homes with poison powder. His wife (Judy Davis) happens to be severely addicted to the stuff. She loves to inject it into her breast. An eerie Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider) recommends a different addiction, the black meat of a certain Brazilian centipede.
It’s futile, and almost irrelevant, to rehash the plot, but Weller goes through increasingly hallucinatory experiences. He’s brought before a large beetle who claims to be Weller’s controller in some convoluted secret mission. He plays the William Tell game with his wife but shoots too far beneath the tumbler perched on her head. Running from police capture, he eventually finds himself (or appears to find himself) in a world called Interzone.
In this weird, Tangiers-like city — thronged with willing Arab boys, jaded expatriates and those typewriter-cum-bugs — he tries to write the novel “Naked Lunch.” He encounters man-sized alien bugs known as “Mugwumps.” He meets eccentric writer Ian Holm and half-man-half-creepy-crawly Julian Sands. He runs into Judy Davis again — but she’s another character now.
Despite its outrageous scenes — including the ravishing of a gay youth by centipedal Sands — there’s something muted about the film. It feels studiously surrealistic, an excuse for cinematic buggery; deep in its center there’s a lack of conviction. It’s not an emotional movie. It’s hard to feel engaged. Weller’s well-known, simpatico face affords familiarity. In this psychic terrain, where you’re on your own, you take whatever familiarity you can get. He gives as strong a performance as these strange circumstances allow. Yet it’s small comfort. This movie feels like what it is — a Canadian eulogy to a Burroughs novel.
Burroughs cognoscenti should not search for too much of a fix. It’s impossible to transmogrify the novelist’s extraordinary word play, his dry-ice irony, the beauty and frustration of his drug-muse inscrutability. It’s also hard to sum up the book’s rounded-spectrum of cruelty, addiction, hypocrisy, lies and truth. Also gone, for obvious reasons, are the passages of cruel, homosexual rape fantasies.
In the movie’s press notes, Cronenberg states he isn’t really adapting the book so much as dreaming up the circumstances in which Burroughs created “Naked Lunch.” To this end, he also draws from the author’s real-life history (his apparently accidental killing of his wife), as well as his other works, including “Junky” and “Exterminator!” It has been uttered more than once that Cronenberg is the only director who could have done this movie (adaptations have been attempted and abandoned before). But, if anything, his college-try efforts prove that no one should do it.

Copyright the Washington Post, Desson Howe

David Cronenberg - (1991) Naked Lunch.mkv

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Language(s):English, Arabic
Subtitles:English

The post David Cronenberg – Naked Lunch (1991) first appeared on Cinema of the World.