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13 Tzameti (2005)
If money troubles ever made you feel like you had a gun to your head, you’ll appreciate 13 Tzameti. The film is a sharp variation on The Most Dangerous Game, a slightly more egalitarian version where instead of fleeing for their lives the participants stand to walk away with a decent payout, provided the chamber in the gun behind them turns out empty. Place your bets.
Aug062011 -
Different from the Others (1919)
(In light of Netflix’s upcoming price changes, I’m going to shift emphasis a bit and start running through whatever DVD exclusives I can before I’m left with the streaming-only plan.)
Over time, some ideas come in and out of fashion. For a time in Germany around the turn of the twentieth century, the idea that homosexuality was a normal and natural part of the human condition was advocated by reform groups and gradually found traction. And then Hitler came along, came into fashion for a time, and put a stop to that for a while. But the brief window between the end of the Great War and the ascension of the powers behind the next saw one of the first major pushes for gay civil rights in the country. And from this came the first original feature film to advocate this and for the outright repeal of the German sodomy law Paragraph 175 …
Jul222011 -
Bunny O’Hare (1971)
There has to be a way to describe movies like this without making them sound more interesting than they actually are.
May032011 -
Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior (2003)
“Dom is a bastard!”
-Random villager
Joe Bob Briggs typically includes a list of various fighting techniques he observed in the film being reviewed. That will come in handy for Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior as it features (in no particular order):
- Knife fu
- Hammer fu
- Window fu
- Rope fu
- Fridge fu
- Elbow fu
- Curry fu
- 2x4 fu
- Electrical wiring fu
- Tuk-tuk fu
- Leg-on-fire fu
- Karma fu
And so on. You’ll notice I didn’t mention actual fighting techniques because such a list is long enough as it is.
Apr212011 -
Vicious Lips (1986)
If there’s any surefire way of setting yourself up for crushing disappointment, it’s getting your hopes up for a low-budget, mid-1980s post-apocalypictic/cyberpunk New Wave rock musical/thriller. Actually, the first thirty minutes of Vicious Lips did get my hopes up slightly. There’s no plot, no exposition, no character development, but it did have that glorious kind of vision where the future is a dark, grungy neo-noir punk landscape achieved through unconvincing matte paintings, shooting in warehouses and outlining fucking everything in neon. Add that the main characters are an all-girl band with massive feathered hair, dangly earrings and too much eye shadow who belt out power ballads and play guitars with attached bug zappers, and I had quite a bit of goodwill built up.
Apr202011 -
American Raspberry (1977)
Remember The Kentucky Fried Movie? Remember how it was up and front a series of disconnected skits? Now, do you remember thinking, “If only there were some plot that could make sense of all this?” No, no you don’t, because you shouldn’t need a plot to justify your lack of a plot!
Thus we get the story of American Raspberry (aka Prime Time, aka Funny America) in which the various skits and commercial parodies are justified by a plot about the American airwaves being taken over by a stream of crude commercial parodies and skits as the President and his advisors struggle to end the crisis. To get this out of the way, the whole “story” is completely useless except presumably to have padded the film out to the minimal feature length of 70 minutes. It’s the same kind of gelatinous filler used to add mass to stuff like whipped cream.
Apr052011 -
The Naked Civil Servant (1975); An Englishman in New York (2009)
No credit for the excellence of this play is due to Mr. Crisp; he is merely the raw material from which it is made.
-Quentin Crisp
For a man who often joked his chief ambition was to do as little as possible, Quentin Crisp lead a storied life. Arguably, it was by doing as little as possible that made him who he was, in that he refused to be anybody but himself, and he lived long enough to see himself regarded as an outcast, a celebrity, an activist, an anachronism and finally an icon.
Mar302011 -
Crazy Love (2007)
It’s your standard romantic story: Boy meets Girl, Boy and Girl are separated for decades, Boy and Girl are finally reunited and live happily ever after. Except that the reason Boy and Girl were separated is that Boy went to prison for hiring someone to throw acid in Girl’s face. It’s complicated.
Mar182011 -
Yossi & Jagger (2002)
Yossi & Jagger is a film caught between naturalism and melodrama. It depicts life at an Israeli military outpost with an unpretentious, down-to-earth authority and then embroils the characters in a romantic drama right out of high school, complete with that glorious cliche where one character leans in towards another in a platonic gesture and a witness ten feet away mistakes it for kissing. Yossi and Jagger are the male couple at the center of the film. This isn’t an issue for them professionally (Israel has allowed gays to serve openly since 1993), but Yossi is reluctant to make any sort of public commitment and things are further complicated by the arrival of a female soldier who has a crush on Jagger while rejecting another officer’s advances, all while they’re preparing for an ambush mission that very night- did I mention the film is only an hour long?
Mar102011 -
Pierrot le fou (1965)
Film is like a battleground. There’s love, hate, action, violence, death … in one word, emotion.
That’s director Samuel Fuller’s contribution in an early scene of Pierrot le fou. It’s an interesting line to have so early in the film because Godard is not noted for the kind of red-blooded two-fisted approach of Fuller, and much of Pierrot can appear inert in comparison with something like, say, Shock Corridor. There is plenty of love, hate, action, violence and death in Pierrot, but not much emotion, and for Godard, who made deconstruction into a genre all its own, that’s not surprising.
Mar022011
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In 2010 I signed up with Netflix for their instant streaming service. Within a few months of browsing and despite removing titles as I watched them I maxed out the instant queue's limit of 500 titles. Now I'm trying to get it back in order by writing through it.