Burning love (6/15/99)
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The Thirteenth Floor. [Josef Rusnak, 1999.]
The motion picture that asks the question every other motion picture has been asking lately, namely, What is Reality? and answers it in pretty much the same way. Vincent D’Onofrio does well as a deranged hacker; Gretchen Mol, on the other hand, seems to have been cast only because Patricia Arquette can’t be everywhere at once. [But rest assured computer scientists are working on it.]
Lust In The Dust. [Paul Bartel, 1985.]
One of the great absurdist Westerns: two frontier harlots [Lainie Kazan and Divine, and a large part of the joke is their striking resemblance] discover while contending for the hand of strong silent gunslinger Tab Hunter that they are sisters separated at birth and that the matching tattoos on their buttocks combine to form the map leading to the famous lost treasure of Chile Verde. With memorable musical interludes.
Reform School Girls. [Tom DeSimone, 1986.]
The title says it all. A personal favorite, because of the casting of Wendy O. Williams as Dormitory Boss Bitch, and the appearance of that monumental challenge to the modern brassiere Sybil Danning as the evangelical warden.
The Secret Cinema. [Paul Bartel, 1967.]
Bartel’s first [thirty minute] minifeature, made illicitly on weekends during the late Sixties with borrowed cameras and stolen film: a girl discovers that her life has been filmed without her knowledge, and that everything that happens to her is designed to make her the butt of an elaborate joke. Funny, sinister, brilliantly original; everything
The Truman Show pretended to be, thirty years in advance.
The Dream Life Of Angels. [
La vie revée des anges. Erick Zonca, 1998.]
A couple of girls working at a garment factory in Lille fall in with one another, hang out with a couple of bikers who work as bouncers, and, presently, drift apart. Very simple, very moving, very beautiful. I even forgave the authors the device of the Coma Baby. [Rest assured that this does not signal a general change of heart; I still want to kill Jay McInerney.] Check it out.
Caged Heat. [Jonathan Demme, 1974.]
Demme’s celebrated directorial debut under the sponsorship of Roger Corman, the definitive women’s-prison movie, with Erica [Vixen] Gavin as the New Cookie and the incomparable Barbara Steele as the Wicked Warden, appears in a new video edition prefaced by a dazzling string of Corman trailers which provide a veritable encyclopedia of exploitation:
Big Bad Mama (“She makes money the old-fashioned way...she steals it!”),
Candy Stripe Nurses (Keep abreast of the medical world!”),
Eat My Dust (“When they get their hands on seven hundred horses, they’ve got to get into trouble!”),
The Big Doll House (“Women...locked behind walls of concrete and steel!”),
Deathsport (“In the year 3000, all freedoms are crimes!”); and with an interview with Corman himself by Leonard Maltin. With a chase, a shootout, a girlfight in the shower, some fascinating experiments with electroshock therapy, and brain surgery attempted with a powerdrill. Undoubtedly one of the few flicks in the female-jungle genre to have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art.
The Phantom Of The Opera. [Rupert Julian, 1925.]
The silent interpretation of the venerable classic, with Lon Chaney the Elder as the troll under the bridge and Mary Philbin as his bimbo protege. No subsequent version can compare to it. — If only because of the poetry of the titles: “From hidden places beyond the wall, a melodious voice, like the voice of an angel, spoke to her.” — How much was lost, in the transition to sound.
The Phantom Menace. [George Lucas, 1999.]
As if it mattered what I think. Still, a few notes: — The undersea city is yet another homage to the
Flash Gordon serials; the planet/city is Trantor exactly as Asimov pictured it; the pod race [or whatever they called it] is of course the chariot race from
Ben-Hur; the dogfights derive from the assault on the Death Star, and the final saber-duel [again composed about a well of infinite depth] is straight out of the
Empire Strikes Back. But here, as always, what Lucas steals, he improves upon; and, obviously, there is much here that no one before him ever dared to imagine. — The interaction of the real and the virtual actors is imperfect; and in general Neeson et al. seem prone to a certain dissociation from their environment which could only be corrected by some means that might allow them a direct perception of the persons and things which are in the present state of the art only added to the greenscreen months after the fact. The practice Lucas apparently employed of mixing and morph-matching disparate takes in postproduction is not [in this view] a step in the right direction. — The editing seemed a trifle choppy. — As for the obligatory scene in which the gifted lad bids good-bye to the stinking desert town that gave him birth, I think we have now seen enough of these ritual re-enactments of Lucas’s farewell to Modesto; I liked it best in
American Graffiti, and [unless he plans on bringing back Wolfman Jack] it’s time for him to put it to rest. — But, sheesh, what a spaceship. Bring on the next episode.
Later.
____________Sein und Zeit (5/14/99)
