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One last hurrah before I go off to War:

History of the World Part 1 (Mel Brooks 1981) I did not laugh even once during this compendium of random historical "comedy" sketches coupled with two longer bites at Caesar's Rome and the French Revolution. Here's an example of a joke, according to Mel Brooks: Fade in. The scene is a Roman marketplace. We see an anonymous black man dressed in the same robes as the white extras, only he is listening to a boombox perched on his shoulder. The radio is blasting "Funky Town." Hold on this jiving black man for three to five seconds, then fade out. While watching all I could think of was how the tired and belabored comedic stylings of It's a Mad……………………………………….World didn't die with TV's golden era, they were just repurposed into lowest common denominator embarrassments like this. Though, speaking of golden, if you find the act of peeing in and of itself funny, good news, this film is literally made for you!

Mystic Pizza (Donald Petrie 1988) Moderately successful coming of age pic that confused me from the start as to the approximate ages of the three heroines-- I thought they were all in their early 20s but eventually it becomes clear that all the action is supposed to take place in the summer/fall after high school for at least one of them. Coulda fooled me! Obviously Julia Roberts rode this film's visibility the farthest (and she's playing against her sweetheart type as the film's woman of loose morals), and Lili Taylor went on to all those indies, and Annabeth Gish… was in that Jon Cryer movie I saw a couple weeks ago. Well, can't win 'em all. Nothing here is particularly good or bad, it's just not much of anything as the three girls deal with three guys to varying degrees of happiness. And there's a pizza place. Much prefer Two Guys and a Girl to Three Girls on that count.

Spaceballs (Mel Brooks 1987) Well, here's another film I had a vague recollection of from childhood, but like the other Brooks film I watched above, this too failed to elicit a single laugh, though I would say it fares the better of the two. The real problem with this film (and it happens a lot in his work) is Brooks' utterly inept comic timing, with every pause between jokes and extended double-takes and the annoying mugging for the camera during several of John Candy's over-sold lines ("Funny, she doesn't look Druish" -- HOLD HEAD ANGLE FOR CAMERA SEVERAL SECONDS AFTERWARDS TO MAKE WAY FOR ALL THOSE LAFFS). Nothing about what's presented is funny (Okay, there's one amusing moment after lots of flailing to gently mock the Star Wars merchandising where a Spaceballs-emblazoned bedsheet has the words "SPACEBALLS: THE SHEET" printed on it, but that's the fortieth best joke in a better film and it still didn't elicit a chuckle). Even the clumsy and persistent fourth-wall breaking jokes regarding Rick Moranis come off as little more than bad cartoon-aping. The biggest problems here are a basic lack of comedic vision, purpose, and intent: You've got all this rich, popular material to mock and you go for… dick jokes? Really?

Targets (Arthur Penn 1985) Gene Hackman's like totally squaresville according to his auto-mechanic rebel son, Matt Dillon. But then, wouldn't you knows it, turns out Hackman's actually ex-CIA. Complications ensue. Hackman can and does do movies like this in his sleep, but Dillon is really annoying in this film, with every third line a variation of "AWW COME ON DAD!" This movie feels so ungodly long-- at what I thought must be the half-way point I was saddened to discover I was only 25 minutes in on a two hour movie. It didn't get much more promising after that. It's too bad, because the eventual reveal of what everything in the movie's about, a perceived double-cross by one agent from one side against another on the other, could be the kernel of a good spy film. But it is at the heart of this one instead.

domino harvey wrote:One last hurrah before I go off to War:

With world events being the way they are today, you had me quite worried with that line for a moment!

They All Laughed
The most fascinating thing to me about this film is how thoroughly Capt. Ascot morphs his style to suit the coming age of cinema. Even with his period pieces which I've found more in a realist mode he's never really been Scorsese let alone Cassavetes. Yet, from frame one this film seemed to be playing with the idea of being like them. In what for me can't help but feel like an ironic touch Bogdanovich's aim seems to be to make a '70s film much like how he made The Last Picture Show a '50s film or At Long Last Love a '30s.

What makes this go from an interesting stylistic choice into something that feeds into a great movie is how completely it plays as a Capt. Ascot film to the point of subverting and destroying the whole visual aspect. Throughout the film there are these musical choices and also choices in performance which hew so closely to the silliness he developed exaggerate the world until it has to be funny. This isn't the contemporary age or even the '70s so much as them filtered through every obsession of the past Bogdanovich has. Even early in when we get a They Shoot Horses Don't They setting it overwhelms the seriousness of the script, which could be played like a real Sidney Lumet drama, so that you'd have to be insane not to laugh. It's really just a basic trick too. The dialogue and shooting style is basically drama, but there's a small thing like Ritter's glasses or George Morfogen doing sit ups which ruins that drama extending the comedy.

The performances though are what really sells this madness as something resembling good stylistic choices. Special mention to John Ritter especially who is a better Ryan O'Neal than the real thing could ever hope to be. He does that dead pan stone faced variation of Harold Lloyd so good that I wish he had done a million films in with Capt. Ascot. There's no actor I can think of who is a better fit for the aesthetic. Him just sitting, trying to play detective, is such a perfect contrast between filmic look and performance that the mood has to be slapstick despite the silence to movement. Of course though so a massive force as this needs a great counter and fortunately everyone else is a pseudo straight man acting with the weight of drama. The difference between Ben Gazzara here and in something like Husbands for instance is nill which only makes his every frame all the more hilarious. I think at the moment I'm only going to be able to speak in hyperbole.

Even throwing out all of that though the reveal of the hair would make this as great as they come.

The Aviator's Wife
Firstly I just want to give thanks to the Potemkin set which for whatever drawbacks is just a behemoth of excellence and one of the most essential DVDs I've encountered.

Second this film really typifies what I love about Rohmer after he threw the New Wave cobwebs off. The characters, as usual, aren't perfect examples of the human race with their fears and deceptions (to self and others), but even during their greatest failings they're really nice and seem to actually care. Maybe as with the dissing of Francois early on that caring is just a strong enough acknowledgement to avoid the person, but he is still a person in the eyes of the other characters which makes this pseudo La Ronde of breakups so much more meaningful than the base story should allow. It's pretty interesting how each character occupies each part of the relationships, and even the variations on the concepts Rohmer produces, where there is a genuine change in how the empathy is called. This is really where the change of Rohmer as an artist himself is really obvious as the personalities are composed so greatly and framed so well that the empathy works in terms of the scene, the proceeding scene, and in how those roles have been shifted over the course of the film. I'm not even entirely sure how to describe the effect of this triple empathy, but it is utterly must see.

The Postman Always Rings Twice
It was a truly terrible idea to watch this right after the Garnett version which has to be one of the best noirs ever and highlights what doesn't work about this version all the more. The primary issue has to be Nicholson who is so disgusting in his role I have no clue why anything is the plot happens to him beyond that it sort of happened in the book. He's just an ugly mean person who shows no humanity suggesting why he would be hired or that Lange would fall in love with him. At best I suspect it was an attempt to correct some of the sexist elements of Cora, but it just works to make them all the more pronounced. This is definitely going to be my argument number one for why Hays restrictions made for more complex stabs at storytelling.

My Beautiful Laundrette
This is an okay movie with that pleasant leisure that Frears has perfected, but for all of the feigning of a serious movie present the movie plays things about as safe as the subjects could be seen as in 1985. Though I guess that is the key as the film probably means a lot more from a historical perspective than it does for any actual quality it might have. The only other serious examples I can think of to relate this film with either didn't have any play for mainstream audiences or would be a few years off. Nevertheless I find it interesting how it plays with the idea of being vulgar while not actually engaging in any vulgarities. The sex is played almost asexually despite getting constant little reminders that it exists for instance.

knives wrote:They All Laughed (...) I think at the moment I'm only going to be able to speak in hyperbole.

Most appropriate response possible. I don't know what else I have left to say about my favorite film considering I wrote the book on it, but I still love seeing others enjoy it!

Obviously the correct response is repeating my post till I tell you to stop.

It's worth noting that we had quite a bit of discussion about They All Laughed during the last '80s project. I haven't watched it since then and am looking forward to revisiting it.

domino harvey wrote:

Feego wrote: Unless you’ve got Jean-Claude Van Damme or Jackie Chan or Joan Collins, five minutes of scrapping on someone’s front lawn just doesn’t make for grand action-film spectacle.

Put those three together, though, and it'd make for one hell of a movie (...Googling to see if Joan Collins is still alive)

That would be the weirdest remake of The Killers ever made! (Collins would obviously take the Lee Marvin part!)

And of course Joan Collins is alive! She was just on the BBC's One Show a couple of months ago being asked about cooking, the problem of giant bears roaming the nation's TV studios or the issues of wildlife in the country's disappearing hedgerows, or something like that!

EDIT: And how could I have forgotten her recent advert!

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now, it's just Joan Collins and her animal pals!

Feego wrote:Lethal Weapon (1987, Richard Donner)
Unceasingly popular buddy-cop movie was only mildly diverting to me. The best thing here is Mel Gibson’s nutcase performance, which ranges from Three Stooges-inspired mania to pretty convincing depression over his wife’s recent death. Everything else just fell short of my (not exactly high) expectations. The action scenes aren’t that exciting. The relationship between Gibson and Danny Glover was purely by-the-numbers old pro meets rookie, even though Gibson seems too old to be a rookie. Even Gary Busey’s villain wasn’t as over-the-top as I had hoped. It all leads to a flat-out stupid finale in which Gibson and Busey, who for the past 100 minutes have both been positively trigger-happy, decide to have an extended fist fight in front of the entire police force who dutifully stand back and watch. As entertaining as it may sound to see these two particular actors beat the crap out of each other, it gets old quickly. Unless you’ve got Jean-Claude Van Damme or Jackie Chan or Joan Collins, five minutes of scrapping on someone’s front lawn just doesn’t make for grand action-film spectacle.

2 is a better use of the formulas that were kind of bubbling under in the first film. The subsequent 2nd half of the series is flawed in only the way big-bucks sequels are but have a charm all their own to a degree. I'm even turned around on the last installment, because for such a haphazard production (they started in January of '98 with no shooting script in place) it manages to retain some sense of cohesion and the aforementioned charm.

Viewing Log:

9 1/2 Weeks (Adrian Lyne, 1986): Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke star in a film that apparently was written a by a particularly mean thirteen year old boy. Elizabeth (Basinger) runs a New York art gallery, and gets taken in by the mysterious financial guru John (Rourke) with the pick up line "Every time I see you, you're buying chicken". Next thing we know, she's his live-in sex slave. Written with the maturity of the graffiti found in a high school restroom, the film tries desperately to be sexy. But, all of the film's sex scenes, from the refrigerator food fight to the back alley rain run off screwing come off as utterly ridiculous. To compound matters, John is an asshole. Their relationship should have ended on their first date when he forced her into the Ferris wheel, stopped it when her car was at the top, and then walked away. Sorry girlfriend, but you can do better, and the constant juvenile pranks that he pulls on you are proof of that. The film's tagline is "They Broke Every Rule"...of good filmmaking! Seriously, this one was just awful.

Blind Chance (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1987): Witek (Boguslaw Linda) is a medical student on leave from his studies in this outstanding drama from Krzysztof Kieslowski. The film follows three possible futures of Witek in an indeterminate world, where a single choice will lead to a radically different outcome. The central conceit of the three different futures works quite well (remember, this was before the imitations from the 90s), the film's stars do an outstanding job in their roles, and fundamental tension of the waning authoritarian state makes works well too. Oh, and Lyne and Zalman King should have watched this to learn how to make a film effortlessly sexy. Soft lighting, saxophones, and cliche ridden dialogue will get you nowhere. Naturalistic acting from Boguslawa Pawelec and Monika Gozdzik will get you a lot further. The two effortlessly exude sexiness in the scenes that they're in.

Eijanaika (Shôhei Imamura, 1981): Well, this was one big fun mess up until the very end. The film tells the story of Genji (Shigeru Izumiya) a Japanese born immigrant to the US in the nineteenth century who returns to his native land in search of his lost wife Ine (Kaori Momoi). However, things do not go well upon his return. His wife has become a sideshow stripper and his old friends plot to prevent his return to the states. The film's epic 151 minute run time contains a lot of confusing turns and loose ends, that keep this film from ever achieving masterpiece status, but it is really damn good. The last half hour or so which features a Bacchanalian riot of semi-nude and crossed dressed revelers singing a the licentious and nihilistic song "Why Not?" before an army trying to save face with the neighboring townspeople. This is a truly unforgettable ending.

On Top of the Whale (Raoul Ruiz, 1982): This is the first of what I anticipate to be many Ruiz films that I will watch for the project. Since I've only previously seen 1983's Three Crowns of the Sailor, that leaves me with only 37 features, shorts, and television specials to make my way through for the decade! This bizarre fantasy, however, didn't exactly leave the best impression of my journey ahead. The film recounts the travels of a group of anthropologists and linguists who search Patagonia for the last speaker of a dying language consisting of a single word that means whatever he wants it to be. The film is fairly laborious without a sufficiently fulfilling payoff. It works best when taken as a send up of colonialism and intellectual pretensions, but even here the film barely connected with me. That being said, there are a handful of his works for the decade that I'm really looking forward to seeing.

I'll use this as another opportunity to plug Zegen as my favorite Imamura of the decade, with Ken Ogata as a Quixotic brothel owner being unknowingly used as a pawn for Japanese colonial interests. It almost feels like the culmination of his decade of documentaries, with their obsession with prostitutes and unreturned soldiers.

Unfortunately, nothing has changed since the last project, and this still has no subtitles. But if you somehow get the chance, take it.

Cold Bishop wrote:I'll use this as another opportunity to plug Zegen as my favorite Imamura of the decade, with Ken Ogata as a Quixotic brothel owner being unknowingly used as a pawn for Japanese colonial interests. It almost feels like the culmination of his decade of documentaries, with their obsession with prostitutes and unreturned soldiers.

Unfortunately, nothing has changed since the last project, and this still has no subtitles. But if you somehow get the chance, take it.

Yes, I already went searching far and wide for subtitles for Zegen. I too came up empty.

Zegen is a film I still haven't manage to track down even in unsubbed form. I can't imagine I would like it more than "Eejanaika" (which I really really love -- even as a sub-mediocre Panorama DVD).

domino harvey wrote:Matrix, I think the R4 of True Stories is widescreen

The only place I've found online to buy this is here. Not too bad of a price, but does anyone know of any other options?

Viewing Log:

Deprisa, Deprisa (Carlos Saura, 1981): With a cast of non-professional actors, Carlos Saura weaves an intricate story of nihilistic youth in post-Franco Spain whose penchant for criminal behavior seems to stem as much from boredom as it does from their desire to make an easy buck. Disaffected waitress Ángela (Berta Socuéllamos) agrees to go on a date with car thief Pablo (Jose Antonio Valdelomar González) during which he takes her for target practice. She proves to be a natural, and without any explanation quits her old life and joins his gang of thieves as a stickup artist. Since I hadn't heard of this title before it popped up on Hulu, I didn't exactly have high expectations for this one going in, but much to my delight, the exploits of these characters made for a rather solid drama that was tonally very different from much of Saura's work from the previous decade. Casting non-professional actors is always a risky proposition, but it works out well here, as González and the rest of the cast of misfits occupy their roles very nicely.

El Dorado (Carlos Saura, 1988): Another of Saura's lesser known works from the decade, this time we find him recreating the true story of a late 16th century Spanish expedition down the Amazon in search of the fabled lost city of gold. While the film will inevitably draw comparison's to Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God given the similar aims and outcomes of the expeditions, the tone of the films couldn't be more different. While Herzog's film captures the lighting in a bottle that was unhinged Klaus Kinski, Saura's film begins by following loyal Spanish governor Ursúa (Lambert Wilson), but...

Spoiler

pulls a Psycho by killing off his character halfway through the film.

A series of bloody betrayals occur, eventually leaving the unhinged Aguirre (Omero Antonutti) in charge, but can he survive both his men's mutinous spirit and his own madness? Although it may not be Saura's best work (parts of it were quite confusing), it's still a pretty great film that showcases the director's ability to do good work in different mediums.

Four Friends (Arthur Penn, 1981): Despite having a fairly great decade in the 70s, Arthur Penn's work sunk to a new low as he started the 80s with this lifeless and turgid piece of shit. The film tells the story of four high school chums with nothing in common: Danilo (Craig Wasson) the bookish son of Yugoslavian immigrants, Georgia (Jodi Thelen) the free spirit obsessed with Isadora Duncan, David (Michael Huddleston) an overweight and nebbish klutz who's entering middle age before he's even done with his teen years, and Tom (Jim Metzler) a handsome athlete. With each of them representing a broad archetype rather than a fleshed out character, the four friends embark on different paths in life which lead them to occasionally intersect in uninteresting ways. Nothing that happens here makes any sense, from the spontaneous singing of "Hit the Road Jack" at the career day presentation to the wedding where the father of the bride gives a one sentence speech and then goes on a shooting spree. No one comes away from this one looking good, from the lifeless leads to Steve Tesich with his inane screenplay to Arthur Penn with his inept direction. This one really is that bad.

The Long Riders (Walter Hill, 1980): Walter Hill's foray into the James-Younger mythos may be best remembered today for its stunt casting of four real life pairs of brothers (Carradines, Guests, Keaches, and Quaids), but there's also a fairly decent western lurking under this headline grabbing move. Owing much to the Peckinpah westerns of the previous two decades, Hill's film is a violent and unabashed look at the exploits of the gang as they escalate from ejecting a member for needless killing toward the beginning to an epic gunfight in a bank robbery gone awry. There's very little new territory carved out here, but what it does, it does well. Like I previously said, the style here is very much in imitation of a specific subgenre of westerns, but thanks to Hill's skilled hand the derivative aspects of the film are easy to overlook.

New Wave Hookers (Gregory Dark, 1985): In the last decade project, I viewed one hardcore film which was known for its artistic aspirations, so I figured that I would try that for the 80s as well. For this decade, it's got to be New Wave Hookers, right? I'm under the impression that the advent of home video technology resulted in the death of many of the artistic pretensions found in the 70s and instead ushered in cheaply made plotless films. Are there any other porn films from this decade that aspire to greater heights or are worth checking out? Regardless, this is one strange flick. The film begins with a pair of doofuses shooting the shit on a couch and drinking beer as they begin to drift off. They then have the same dream in which the duo become pimps, one a white punk rocker who thinks that he's Asian and the other an African American man who dresses in ultra baggy 80s clothes. Needless to say, the film has an interesting take on racial issues... Along with a nearly nude, deaf, mute, and psychic bdsm pet man-slave, the two use headphones playing new wave music to hypnotize unsuspecting women and add them to their stable of prostitutes. So, like Behind the Green Door in the last decade project, the women here aren't consenting to the sex in the story, they're just being raped. Not good. The film is divided into several vignettes as the pair send out their hypnotized prostitutes to clients. Words cannot describe how weird this film is, operating under a kind of dream logic that makes almost no sense, but can be mildly entertaining. Aside from the icky non-consensual sex in the film's storyline, my biggest problem with it is the same problem that I always have with pornography: unless it's being used as an erotic stimulant, the sex scenes are dreadfully repetitive and boring. The film is at its best when it allows its characters to just be strange between sex scenes, but even here it often deviates to icky subjects. Pass.

I think I wrote about it last time, but Long Riders is a film that infuriates and fascinates me in equal measure. It's this bizarre mix of revisionist/anti-western stylistics and traditional/mythic-western storytelling, I really don't know what to make of it. (In this regards, I can't help but link the film with John Milius's Dillinger).

The Northfield Robbery, however, is maybe the best thing Hill ever did. Taking place well over a reel, its practically a short film in itself. But I don't know about the rest of the movie...

From my wayward VHS youth, I am especially fond of Nightdreams which does the New Wave aesthetic much better much earlier (including music from the eternally underrated Wall of Voodoo) and I remember being actually genuinely funny its own trashy way. I particularly remember a bit revolving around a Cream of Wheat box that is sublime in its poor taste.

However, I think its Cafe Flesh that is genuinely considered the great porno film of the decade.

Based on this clip, surely the correct answer is Nightdreams (NSFW vid within a SFW site)

Plus Nightdreams has the advantage of being connected to ALF.

Are you telling me that's Max Wright playing dat sax?!

On the other hand, Cafe Flesh has Richard Belzer.

EDIT: Ha! And now I find out that both films have the same director... which makes absolutely perfect sense. Anyone up for a Stephen Sayadian write-up?

Thanks for the help, guys. I had vague memories of reading that WFMU page on Cafe Flesh years ago, but couldn't remember the name of the film. I'll definitely try to track it down.

bamwc2 wrote:El Dorado (Carlos Saura, 1988): Another of Saura's lesser known works from the decade, this time we find him recreating the true story of a late 16th century Spanish expedition down the Amazon in search of the fabled lost city of gold. While the film will inevitably draw comparison's to Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God given the similar aims and outcomes of the expeditions, the tone of the films couldn't be more different. While Herzog's film captures the lighting in a bottle that was unhinged Klaus Kinski, Saura's film begins by following loyal Spanish governor Ursúa (Lambert Wilson), but...

Spoiler

pulls a Psycho by killing off his character halfway through the film.

A series of bloody betrayals occur, eventually leaving the unhinged Aguirre (Omero Antonutti) in charge, but can he survive both his men's mutinous spirit and his own madness? Although it may not be Saura's best work (parts of it were quite confusing), it's still a pretty great film that showcases the director's ability to do good work in different mediums.

Here's the piece I wrote on El Dorado a little while ago. Spoilers:

I've only seen a television showing of El Dorado (1.85 rather than 2.35 widescreen), and thought it was OK, with some major reservations. I feel Aguirre, Wrath of God is the far better film - it has a raw quality that helps to create a feeling of actually living and struggling through the events with the characters. El Dorado is spectacular but is made in a much more 'classical' style (the main characters barely get their armour muddied!), keeping its distance from Aguirre and not focusing too much on the insane folly of it all (it is described as being officially commissioned as a commemorative film in the opening credits and it plays very much like an 'authorised' version of history).

There is not really a sense of the number of people slowly dwindling as the expedition becomes hopeless - there are still a huge number of extras even at the end of the film. At the same time there are no scenes showing the physical labour of the people being ruled by a bunch of variously idealistic, greedy and crazy people vying for control of the expedition. There is nothing comparable to that magnificent first shot of the Herzog film of the sheer scale of the expedition that was taken to search for El Dorado, a shot that had me immediately thinking of all the people struggling to fulfil their master's crazy ambitions (which also applies as much to Herzog as to the events he is showing) and a shot that contrasts perfectly with the final image of Aguirre alone on the raft, showing how all those people ended up dying in vain.

The nearest El Dorado comes to a similar comment is an early scene where a boat is launched to much celebration, which then immediately breaks in half and sinks, and a scene where one of the noblemen who was plotting to return to Peru is humiliated by having to row the boat with the black slaves.

I was left feeling that El Dorado was much more of an 'official' or nobleman's take on history, concerned with plots, betrayals and infighting among the elite (even the earlier boat launching scene shies away from showing the fate of those on the boat that sinks to focus on the head shipbuilder's reaction to seeing his boat sink - akin to showing how terrible the sinking of the Titanic was from the perspective of the manager of the White Star Line Board of Directors back in Liverpool trying to figure out how much the tragedy has cost them!) while Aguirre, Wrath of God seems to move beyond the story itself to portray the universal themes behind the specific story.

El Dorado also manages to make this epic story strangely boring in its middle section - there must be about forty minutes where Lambert Wilson and his clique are dispatched, then new rulers are brought in who are then also killed, then new people lead the expedition until they are killed at which point Aguirre kills the people who plotted the last assassination!

This is another way in which the film is strangely by the numbers in its storytelling - once it became apparent that we were going to have to watch a third cycle of paranoia, plotting, assassination and spinning of the assassination to the troops I found myself getting a little frustrated with the film. I guess it was an attempt to show the way the expedition was cannibalising itself through repetitive cycles of violence, but if that was the aim the message was belabored a little too much.

For a film that takes far fewer risks in telling its story, it strangely feels much cruder than Herzog's film (i.e. the scene where the horses are killed for their meat) - it seems to be trying to fit the characters into simple hero and villian roles compared to Herzog managing to find some compassion and empathy even for Aguirre himself.

This is perhaps best illustrated by the way Herzog finds a beautiful poetic image of the now bereaved wife of the original leader of the expedition walking off into the jungle with her retinue never to be seen again with the same character's treatment in El Dorado - as a manipulative slut who after her man is killed is caught in bed with Aguirre's power rival and is then chased into the jungle and killed onscreen. One interpretation allows the character to retain a tiny shred of dignity through making the audience fully aware of her inevitable death without having to show it (which moment might also inform the later Grizzly Man and Herzog's decision not to play the tape of the fatal bear attack in the film), the other makes it more obvious as to her eventual fate but also imposes its opinion of what it thinks of the character in the way it treats her.

I don't know whether this problem was the fault of the television broadcast that I saw or not, but Lambert Wilson's dialogue also did not seem particularly well dubbed into Spanish - it was very out of synch at times, which was very obvious in his big speech scene at the beginning of the film.

So there are a lot of major flaws in the film, which focuses on the most limited rather than universal aspects of the story, which ends without taking events fully to their inevitable conclusion and which fails to capture any of the danger or struggle of the expedition, instead making it feel at times like a historical cruise trip(!), but some of the images are extremely beautiful and it is certainly worth checking out if you are interested. Watch Aguirre, Wrath of God first though!

bamwc2 wrote:Thanks for the help, guys. I had vague memories of reading that WFMU page on Cafe Flesh years ago, but couldn't remember the name of the film. I'll definitely try to track it down.

I tracked that film down many years ago on the same assumption that it was (by reputation) the most artistically interesting porn film of the eighties. But alas, it was a terrible piece of shit. Pretentious but inept.

Ry Cooder's score for Long Riders helps kick the film up (at least) a notch in my estimation. One of my favorites of the past few decades.

Three 'experimental' films I watched recently:

Sleepwalk (Sara Driver, 1986): this is even more extraordinary than Driver's debut You Are Not I, and again has the wonderful Suzanne Fletcher in the lead role. The title says it all: this is probably the filmic representation of a dream filmed in a seemingly 'realistic' way, so it's probably not advisable to try to make too much sense of the strange happenings in this film, which however in itself feels completely 'logical' and not random at all. Beautiful camerawork with dense, poetic, unsettling and haunting images all the time (think of that stunning central sequence in which the protagonist moves down in an elevator, and on every floor the door seems to open to a completely different house). If I had to compare it to something it would probably be the works of David Lynch, but not the Lynch of "Blue Velvet", but rather of "Inland Empire". Amazing stuff and definitely on my list.

Dandy (Peter Sempel, 1987): I remember that this attracted a little bit of attention in its time because of the cast involving several well-known musicians of the 'independent' scene, such as Blixa Bargeld, Nick Cave, Dieter Meier, Lene Lovich and others. It's vaguely inspired by Voltaire's "Candide", but it's basically not much more than a succession of images and short dialogue scenes forming a sort of random meditation on the end of the (western) world. Definitely interesting, stylish, but rather unfocussed, and it left me somewhat at a loss.

Der Rosenkönig (Werner Schroeter, 1986): my first Schroeter, I have to confess, and probably it wasn't the best place to start. The film's barely discernable story is about a middle-aged woman who has moved to Portugal in order to be a rose-grower. Her son has a homosexual relationship with a gardener, and the three characters increasingly become involved in semi-ritualistic actions centering on sex, beauty, and death. Admittedly, the visuals are striking, but the whole thing looks as if the director had wanted to top Visconti and Syberberg in terms of 'decadence' but actually ended up with something that might have come straight out of a Marc Almond video of the time, only that Almond's campyness always had a sense of humour and self-irony which this film is sorely missing. The operatic soundtrack only furthered the clichés (and sure, there are of course the inevitable references to Saint Sebastian and to Caravaggio...).
I found this utterly pretentious nonsense, sorry. And as for a 'poetic' celebration of male sex (I suppose that's what Schroeter was after?), Derek Jarman's The Angelic Conversation is the much more believable and unaffected film.