At 5.30, it's TRUCK TURNER, starring Isaac "Hello, Children" Hayes as the smooth-talking, short-tempered bounty hunter who takes on LA's prostitution underground. It's war between Turner and the most pimptastic pimps you ever saw, led by Yaphet Kotto's Harvard Blue. Blaxploitation at its blaxploitiest and pimpin'est, featuring a score by "Shaft" Hayes himself. Also stars Nichelle "Lt. Uhura" Nichols and Scatman Cruthers.
Check out the badasss trailer!
For the next two films, a double-feature (1 ticket for admission to both), I really have to direct you to read the Lars Nilson descriptions from the Brattle listings as I have no language to describe them myself.
At 7.30, it's PSYCHO FROM TEXAS. No, not Oliver Stone's W. It's a so-bad-it's-good (I hope!) example of the hicksploitation genre. No, no, W doesn't open until the 17th!
And, at 9.30, it's SNAKES! "A rural gothic snake-revenge movie that's oh so much more."
Today's Brattle listings.
Note that TRUCK TURNER plays one last time tomorrow (Thursday) evening as well.
Also, looking ahead to the weekend, "The Compleat LORD OF THE RINGS" program, featuring the director's cuts of all three LOTR movies, kicks off on Friday and runs thru Monday. Sunday features the entire trilogy in order! Check the Brattle schedule for showtimes.
Please support the Brattle theater (and my moviegoing malady =) !
Keep on keepin on~
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Monday, October 06, 2008
Watch-A-Thon flicks 10 to 13.5: PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA, A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS, APPALOOSA, SWEET SUGAR, & CHAINED HEAT
The first two films of my Sunday were directed by Wayne Wang (I'd seen his JOY LUCK CLUB and CENTER OF THE WORLD, but nothing else that I knew of). They kicked off at 11am as part of the Brattle's Sunday "Eye Opener" series. Both films are beautiful in different ways. The stories deal with strangers in a strange land, Chinese characters—one a teenage girl, the other an aged father—as immigrants to the United States. The first, in PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA, is someone with whom it can be very difficult to sympathize at times, while the second, in A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS, is a most charming and lovable lead. I enjoyed both movies greatly, highly recommend them for beautifully crafted intimate moments, and they impressed me so much that I actually hit the Harvard Book Store after the screenings to pick up the collection of short stories that includes the two tales from which these films were adapted—A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS, by Yiyun Li.PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA
A teenage girl faced with an adult decision...
trailer
Sasha arrives in San Francisco with an important decision to make. We're not told what it is, but over the next 48 hours or so, as she reconnects with old friends from Beijing and connects with new playmates in Chinatown's nightlife, such as it is, we piece together her situation—she's four months pregnant—but to be honest, do not learn very much about her.
She wears and sheds several personas, depending on where she is and who she's spending time with—a brief reunion with an old girlfriend, at home and at a dinner party with her pseudo-guardian, an Orientalist intellectual type, or getting a taste of the nightlife with her new "party girl" girlfriend—but details of her true character remain hidden. The most I can say about her with confidence is that she is very much a teenage girl, evident in her solo shopping habits, the contents and appearance of her scrapbook diary, her fixation on txt msging and her camera phone, and her petulant behavior.
Ivy explained that this movie is set to be distributed exclusively via youtube, which, given the beautiful widescreen picture and intimate, close-up, close-quarters cinematography, seems like a crime.
A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYER
A sweet and lonely father-daughter relationship...
trailer
In a Seattle suburb, a young Chinese woman welcomes her father to her apartment home. He's arrived from China to visit with her and travel across America. He's never been a father who connected with and confided in his daughter. Apparently, that was more the mother's role. However, now widowed, he attempts to bridge the emotional chasm between them, but as we watch him explore his new surroundings, we see that he finds it easier to approach and interact with complete strangers than with his one and only child. Every attempt, with daughter, neighbor, or stranger, however, successful or not-so-much, is charming and sweet. In the end the two generations reach a kind of understanding, and along the way, both discover the truths behind misconceptions each had about the other.
APPALOOSA
Kickass western buddy cop flick!
trailer | website
I love just about every part of this new wave old west buddy cop film except for the casting of Renee Z as the provocative romantic interest who threatens to wreck their dozen-year-old partnership. I get her character, but I don't buy her as that character. She does the giddy bit nicely, and there are hints at her weaknesses, but chemistry-wise, it seems like the guys have to build that bridge almost completely from their sides to sell it.
Ed Harris and Viggo Mortenson make for kickass lawmen for hire, masters of their craft whose economy with words is matched by their parsimony with ammunition. Frankly, their chemistry, as friends who trust one another with their lives, is hotter than any between Renee and either of them individually, each always ready with the backhanded (or simply handed) compliment for the other, and in conversation, one regularly, literally, finishes the sentences of the other. Brilliant dialogue throughout, and quick but satisfying bursts of gunplay.
A couple of things I want to remember...
After one eruption, Harris delivers a gem of a one-line observation that I shan't ruin here.
There are also some interesting touches of what I felt was bluesy music that, greedy me, I wanted to hear more of, but honestly, perhaps the touches were all that were needed. I mean, they were memorable, right?
SWEET SUGAR
When sentenced to cutting cane, Sugar raises it instead!
movie clip | Brattle listing
When Sugar is framed up for a drug charge, she's given the choice between jail or a work camp, cutting cane. Hey, her name is Sugar and she's gonna cut cane! What a coincidence! Well, once she gets there, she finds that the warden of this weird camp is a doctor who's devoted to ethnopharmacology, the study of the medicines of primitive cultures. He takes "volunteers" from the prisoners to use as test subjects in his fried, senseless experiments, sometimes dosing them with the herbs, and other times, locking them up with animals who have been dosed (see this kee-razy clip).The plot is way thin (the doctor and his minions abuse their workers, Sugar uses her wiles to engineer a revolution and escape w her friends), and the movie kind of plays like HOGAN'S HEROES meets HEE-HAW with canefields instead of cornfields, about the same level of humor, worse music, a more diverse cast (but still sporting Daisy Dukes and cinched up tops), and some ridiculous fight scenes. Also, throw in some voodoo mojo that hints at demonic possession.
It was nice seeing the impressive figure of Phyllis Davis, who plays Sugar, on the big screen again. I remember her as the fashion designer and Sapphic recruiter from BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. =)
CHAINED HEAT
Linda Blair leads a women's prison revolution...
trailer | Brattle listing
I'd never seen this film before and I feel lucky to have caught it on the big screen and not compromising the experience by giving in to a video rental or happening upon an edited-for-TV version on Spike or something. It must be an archetypal 80s Women In Prison flick.
Found guilty of manslaughter, Linda Blair is sent to serve her time at a women's prison facility. The corrupt warden (Dean Wormer) is in cahootz (and competition, altho he doesn't know it) with his staff, and a faction of the prisoners themselves in running drugs, pornography, and prostitution both inside and outside the walls of the prison. When the competition for the illegal biz comes to a head, the prison population finds itself paying the price in violence, rape, and ultimately, murder. When one of her friends dies as a result, new fish Linda Blair takes it personally. She concocts a plan to launch a riot and raid the warden's office for blackmail leverage, to use on the warden and his goons to win the inmates fair treatment and safety. For her plan to succeed, she'll need to get the rival leaders of the prison gangs to work together. Wacky fun ensues.
Keep on keepin on~
Friday, October 03, 2008
Watch-A-Thon flick 2.5: FLOW
FLOW: FOR LOVE OF WATER—A maddening eye-opener of a documentary
trailer | site
This is a MUST SEE!
Reviewed by WIRED magazine as "the scariest movie at the Sundance Film Festival," FLOW traces the past, documents the present, and cautions on the future of fresh water rights, privatization, and scarcity. In its value as a natural resource, and as a result, in strategic power and influence, it's been called "the next oil," and we can see how dependence on and control of the supply of oil has tilted politics, the economy, and daily life right now, every day.
The film does an excellent job of surveying the state of water pollution and privatization in the 21st century, explaining how industrial interests have used their political power to influence regulation of waste and its disposal, allowing for the pollution and poisoning of the fresh water of not only those unlucky enough to live near factories or refineries, but those living thousands of miles away. Here are some threads/stories covered by the film, what I can recall, at least. Please pardon the vagueness, unremembered proper names, and absence of citations.
A Swedish company produces a particular fertilizer that when dissolved in water has been proven to cause the spontaneous switching of sex in amphibians, and may be connected to reduced sperm count in human males. Once these effects were documented, every country in the EU outlawed the use of the fertilizer. However, in closed door meetings with the EPA, the company managed to win the agency's approval, and the chemical continues to be in use today. The company continues to create and sell the toxic fertilizer to the United States, but it's not allowed to sell it in its own country.
In Michigan, Nestle built a water pumping and bottling facility that was removing fresh water from a source at a monstrous rate, reducing once rolling rivers and deep lakes to shallow creeks and mud flats, essentially stealing the flow of water from lands that thrived on it for millennia. Local farmers, business owners, and citizens came together to fight this theft, and after an extended legal battle, beat Nestle and shut down their pumping operation. When Nestle appealed the decision, they requested that they be allowed to resume pumping until the appeal was resolved. They were allowed. Ultimately, they original verdict was overturned, and the factory resumed pumping at full capacity. The Michigan citizens have appealed Nestle's appeal...
In a town in India, inhabitants faced down a similar challenge, presented by a Coca-Cola plant that was tainting their water and poisoning their environment. Although Coca-Cola denies any wrong-doing, even after attempting to play the benevolent enterprise by offering locals free fertilizer for their crops, touted as nutrition-rich by-products of processing, but actually toxic waste products, after two years of vocal protest, the townspeople succeeded in having the plant shut down.
But it's not all doom and gloom. Just mostly.
There are signs of hope, found in both tradition and technology. For some communities, a return to old ways may spell relief. Traditional irrigation and natural farming techniques can revitalize lands ravaged by the use of the water-thirsty chemicals of modern industrial farming. And ages-old strategies for trapping, storing, and rationing rain water are still sound.
Applied technology, such as a UV irradiator used to kill the bacteria in a community's tainted water source, can be implemented in simple and cheap ways, allowing even the poorest communities to become self-sufficient as far as a clean water supply is concerned. The benefits are quickly seen in health and savings. For instance, water that is safe to drink cuts down on disease and illness in both humans and their livestock, which cuts down on the cost of drugs to treat them.
Other cheap services and tech can be used to allow communities to own their own water supplies. Play pumps are groundwater pumps that are powered by merry-go-rounds! Children play on them, spinning the wheel, which provides the mechanical energy to draw the water out from underground and into pipes and storage. Charity:Water is a service that installs wells and pumps in remote locations inexpensively. Both of these are solutions to freeing poor and remote communities from the tyranny of corporate privatized water distributors.
So, there's some hope, but frankly, there's a whole lotta concerted Bad going on in the world when it comes to water. I just can't touch on everything here, but I hafta say that the IMF and World Bank are once again so the Evil here.
Sad to say, I ended up catching FLOW on the last night it played in Boston. Check the movie's website to see if it's coming to your area, and if it is, DO NOT MISS IT! Also click around the site to learn more, and consider changing your personal habits or getting involved in raising awareness or influencing policy and politics if you can. Before you can't.
* October 4, 2008. Note that I changed the title of this post from "Watch-A-Thon flick 3" to "Watch-A-Thon flick 2.5." By the rules of the Brattle WAT, films screened at the Brattle count as 1 movie, while those screened elsewhere count as half.
Keep on keepin on~
trailer | site
This is a MUST SEE!Reviewed by WIRED magazine as "the scariest movie at the Sundance Film Festival," FLOW traces the past, documents the present, and cautions on the future of fresh water rights, privatization, and scarcity. In its value as a natural resource, and as a result, in strategic power and influence, it's been called "the next oil," and we can see how dependence on and control of the supply of oil has tilted politics, the economy, and daily life right now, every day.
The film does an excellent job of surveying the state of water pollution and privatization in the 21st century, explaining how industrial interests have used their political power to influence regulation of waste and its disposal, allowing for the pollution and poisoning of the fresh water of not only those unlucky enough to live near factories or refineries, but those living thousands of miles away. Here are some threads/stories covered by the film, what I can recall, at least. Please pardon the vagueness, unremembered proper names, and absence of citations.
A Swedish company produces a particular fertilizer that when dissolved in water has been proven to cause the spontaneous switching of sex in amphibians, and may be connected to reduced sperm count in human males. Once these effects were documented, every country in the EU outlawed the use of the fertilizer. However, in closed door meetings with the EPA, the company managed to win the agency's approval, and the chemical continues to be in use today. The company continues to create and sell the toxic fertilizer to the United States, but it's not allowed to sell it in its own country.
In Michigan, Nestle built a water pumping and bottling facility that was removing fresh water from a source at a monstrous rate, reducing once rolling rivers and deep lakes to shallow creeks and mud flats, essentially stealing the flow of water from lands that thrived on it for millennia. Local farmers, business owners, and citizens came together to fight this theft, and after an extended legal battle, beat Nestle and shut down their pumping operation. When Nestle appealed the decision, they requested that they be allowed to resume pumping until the appeal was resolved. They were allowed. Ultimately, they original verdict was overturned, and the factory resumed pumping at full capacity. The Michigan citizens have appealed Nestle's appeal...
In a town in India, inhabitants faced down a similar challenge, presented by a Coca-Cola plant that was tainting their water and poisoning their environment. Although Coca-Cola denies any wrong-doing, even after attempting to play the benevolent enterprise by offering locals free fertilizer for their crops, touted as nutrition-rich by-products of processing, but actually toxic waste products, after two years of vocal protest, the townspeople succeeded in having the plant shut down.
But it's not all doom and gloom. Just mostly.
There are signs of hope, found in both tradition and technology. For some communities, a return to old ways may spell relief. Traditional irrigation and natural farming techniques can revitalize lands ravaged by the use of the water-thirsty chemicals of modern industrial farming. And ages-old strategies for trapping, storing, and rationing rain water are still sound.
Applied technology, such as a UV irradiator used to kill the bacteria in a community's tainted water source, can be implemented in simple and cheap ways, allowing even the poorest communities to become self-sufficient as far as a clean water supply is concerned. The benefits are quickly seen in health and savings. For instance, water that is safe to drink cuts down on disease and illness in both humans and their livestock, which cuts down on the cost of drugs to treat them.
Other cheap services and tech can be used to allow communities to own their own water supplies. Play pumps are groundwater pumps that are powered by merry-go-rounds! Children play on them, spinning the wheel, which provides the mechanical energy to draw the water out from underground and into pipes and storage. Charity:Water is a service that installs wells and pumps in remote locations inexpensively. Both of these are solutions to freeing poor and remote communities from the tyranny of corporate privatized water distributors.
So, there's some hope, but frankly, there's a whole lotta concerted Bad going on in the world when it comes to water. I just can't touch on everything here, but I hafta say that the IMF and World Bank are once again so the Evil here.
Sad to say, I ended up catching FLOW on the last night it played in Boston. Check the movie's website to see if it's coming to your area, and if it is, DO NOT MISS IT! Also click around the site to learn more, and consider changing your personal habits or getting involved in raising awareness or influencing policy and politics if you can. Before you can't.
* October 4, 2008. Note that I changed the title of this post from "Watch-A-Thon flick 3" to "Watch-A-Thon flick 2.5." By the rules of the Brattle WAT, films screened at the Brattle count as 1 movie, while those screened elsewhere count as half.
Keep on keepin on~
Thursday, October 02, 2008
Watch-A-Thon flicks 1 & 2: BLOOD FREAK & WILD PUSSYCAT
My first two flicks off the starting line are part of the Brattle's "Return To The Grindhouse" series, running thru October 9. I highly recommend checking out the listings and seeing everything that doesn't completely turn your stomach! =)
Note that both films play again in this series, so check the schedule if you think yo might be into them.
BLOOD FREAK—He's not a man, he's a turkey-boo~
trailer | Brattle listing
The last time I saw this was in college, courtesy of my classic horror connoisseur roommate, Ross. It's just as fried as I remember it. =)
It's a cautionary tale about the dangers of sullying your body, the lord's temple, with the taint of drugs. At the same time, it's critical of scientists who choose to play god with man and poultry. Herschel, a drifter-biker working an Elvis look befriends a Bible freak named Angel. She introduces him to her sister Ana and her friends, all of whom like to party. A good Christian boy, he resists her repeated attempts to lure him to the dark side, but only for so long. Once he falls, he falls hard, becoming quickly addicted. Meanwhile, Angel's good Samaritan friend offers Herschel a handyman job on his poultry farm. At work he meets a pair of scientists who are working with some sort of experimental process to enhance the growth of their turkeys. They offer to hook him up with drugs in exchange for his help testing the product of their work. Soon after Herschel begins playing guinea pig, he is wracked with convulsions and ultimately transformed into a monster afflicted with his same addiction, but he can only satisfy it with the blood of other junkies! Wacky, low production and, umm... earnestly acted hijinks ensue!
Note that ROLLING THUNDER was originally scheduled to screen at 8pm tonight, but those reels hadn't arrived in time. As a result, there was more time than planned between the 8pm show and the 10pm WILD PUSSYCAT. This is how I spent some of that extra time. =)
THE WILD PUSSYCAT—When revenge is a sexy party...
Brattle listing
This is the older Greek cousin of American femme fatale vengeance flicks, it's not as harsh and graphic, but turns the melodrama up way high, playing like an EMMANUELLE version of SECRETARY meets I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. The vengeance, as well as the crime, in this flick have a distinctly sadomasochistic kink to it. Shot in black and white and scored with an excellent, if repetitive, blend of lounge and pop instrumentals, it's way—well—classier than I expected.Upon her sister's death, Nadia arrives in town and quickly learns that her abusive gigolo of a boyfriend, Nick, basically drove her to kill herself. Nadia sets herself up as a mystery woman and seduces the unwitting but ever cocky Nick into her carefully planned psychosexual torture chamber. Her goal, to punish Nick by putting him thru the ego-dismantling grinder that he subjected her sister to. There's lots of kink but not so much in the way of explicit visuals. There is one scene of particularly violent treatment, but—call me a naive romantic—I hafta say, this would be an awesome date movie for the right super cool couple.
Re-reading the above, I find I'm doing a poor job of relating the goodness here, so I feel obliged to include a copy/paste of the Brattle's blurb for the movie...
Wild Pussycat
(1968) dir Dimis Dadiras w/Gisela Dali, Paul Dillon [88 min]
From Greece comes this amazing, kinky, violent psychosexual soap opera. When good girl Nadia investigates her sister's death she finds out that sadistic pimp Nick is behind it all so she straps on the leather and whips and beats him at his own game. Full of unspeakable perversions, dark secrets, serious chain-smoking, two-way mirrors, orgies and 40-weight sleaze. There's even an adorable pussycat, who purrs and licks her paws as the worst kinds of depravity unravel in front of her. A rare and compulsively entertaining treat that has wowed audiences since its rediscovery.
Rated R; Not Available on Video; Also screens Mon 10/6
One odd observation: I suspect the adorable pussycat is homophobic.
Keep on grindin on~
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
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