Month: February 2006

Savages (1975)

I’d always looked at the DVD sitting there, especially with Michael O’Donoghue’s name on it. So odd. I mean, it’s a Merchant-Ivory film, co-written by O’Donoghue (!), that refers to the said Savages – on the DVD box yet, as “the Mud People.” So it’s intriguing if nothing else.

After the outcries of the indignities in King Kong and stuff about the Noble Natives, I thought this just might be the antidote. For those who don’t know, O’Donoghue was part of National Lampoon as its regulars morphed into SNL and SCTV. He was a main writer on SNL and sometimes performer (Wolverine, Steel Needles in the Eyes), but other than Scrooged, he had precious few screenplays to his credit. Continue reading Savages (1975)

Wholpin DVD

From the McSweeney’s people, who had already launched a rather good monthly magazine that used to be about books and writers called The Believer (It’s not so much about that anymore, and while still good, I no longer get it because I can read about politics, music and films in a dozen other places).

Their latest venture is a quarterly DVD, made up of “shorts.” People continue to make short films even with almost no outlet for them. One would have thought the web would have given more light to this kind of film, but other than the occasional re-cut trailer (Shining, Passion of the Christ) or a photoshopped scene of a jet landing on the 405, it hasn’t really been so. The other possible outlet for this stuff is straight to DVD which again has been tried by various DVD “magazines” with not too much success.

So enter Wholpin from McSweeney’s with an impressive bunch of names on the cover, and actually an impressive bunch of films as well. The variety between the films is impressive; there’s no attempt to create a “theme” thankfully, and the unexpectedness of what you’re getting in each new chapter is really a big part of the fun. Continue reading Wholpin DVD

Cache/Hidden

Jeff and I saw this together last night. We walked in as fans of director Michael Haneke, and walked out with that adoration confirmed, if not exuberantly so–I think it was a strong, smart, challenging film, if not quite the equal of his finest (Time of the Wolf). So it is highly recommended, and I think we both want to puzzle over its objectives and accomplishments.

That said, it is also a film best discussed after viewing, and I don’t want to disrupt any of the pleasures of the text by giving away this or that–you can’t really start addressing without naming, so I’ll avoid explicit spoilers but can’t sidestep certain specifics. Continue reading Cache/Hidden

13 Short Films about Arnab and Jeff

Perhaps, like me, you’ve noticed an underlying–sometimes surfacing–tension between Jeff and Arnab in posts on this site. As I have learned from the movies, such tensions inevitably signal a future moment of intense connection and union. I have been trying to imagine how that future union may occur…. (air gets all wavy and fuzzy:) Continue reading 13 Short Films about Arnab and Jeff

The Wild Bunch

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is being remade. This angers me not because I’m against remakes, but because I have always claimed that I am not against remakes. I may say that there’s nothing wrong with Soderbergh recasting Ocean’s 11, or Van Sant re-shooting Psycho. I’m amused by the idea that someone feels that it is worth the money and effort to remake The Fog and The Pink Panther.

But now there’s a part of me that is bristling–not just because I don’t want anyone to dare even to think of redoing Peckinpah’s masterpiece, but also because I’ve flattered myself into thinking that I’d never write somthing like this (which I’ve taken from Victoria Lindrea’s review of the remake of The Italian Job): “A homage, rather than a remake, it moved the action to Los Angeles and gave the traffic jam a hi-tech spin. But in aping a classic, it could not help but disappoint fans of the original.” Is there anything more predictable than “it could not help but disappoint the fans of the original”? Hollywood must know that “fans of the original” do not, by rule, constitute the majority of ticket sales of remakes. Of course “fans of the original” will be disappointed. Why? Because (I’ve always told myself) they’re idiots. Continue reading The Wild Bunch

In Search of…

In light of recent events in Afghanastan in particular and throughout the Muslim world in general, I thought we might revisit a post from several weeks back regarding Albert Brooks’s In Search of Comedy in the Muslim World. I’m worried that against the background of protests over cartoons published in the Danish press, the natural response to Brooks’s film will be “see? there is no sense of humor in the Muslim world.”

My fear is that recent events will be used to either misconstrue and misunderstand Islam (even more), or to misconstrue and misunderstand comedy (as always hostile, antagonistic) and define it strictly from a sociological point of view (the social function of humor is to indentify, differentiate, control). Continue reading In Search of…

Oddities, Rareties, Un-Findables, etc

I’ve decided to make a trek to the New York Museum of TV and Radio sometime in the next month–with the main intention of seeing Peckinpah’s TV adaptation of Noon Wine, which seems to be entirely unavailable otherwise. If you had the chance what other TV or film items would you look for–what’s not available currently, even by the wily pirates on ebay??

Yes!

just saw sally potter’s Yes and i’m fairly blown away. i’m surprised no one has posted on it yet (though the ever reliable jeff mentioned it in an earlier post!). this is my first sally potter, so i won’t be able to put it in perspective, but what a film! it is decidedly striking, for one, that she should have chosen to have the whole damn thing in rhymed iambic pentameters, and that she wrote every damn word herself. since the delivery is not as crisp as if it had been on stage, and since a fair number of the actors have regional or foreign accents, i assume potter knew we would not be able to get everything. but the two leads, joan allen and simon abkarian, do a pretty splendid job of portraying their characters’ emotions, so whatever you miss in the diction comes through in the body language. Continue reading Yes!

muscles from brussels

there was a period in the late 80s and early 90s when only one person in our circle of friends in sector 21, noida had a vcr and a flat devoid of parents where we could watch movies, get drunk and behave badly (not always in that order). unfortunately, the vcr and the flat belonged to the biggest and loudest member of the group, who also had appalling taste, and as a result we all became experts in such genres as thai kickboxing movies and also in the careers of such lumniaries as jean-claude van damme. i think it is misplaced nostalgia for these misspent years that drives my continued obsession with van damme–though there is also my general obsession with crap action movies (as documented on this blog). all this as preamble to the admission that i watched nowhere to run on ondemand last night.
Continue reading muscles from brussels