Jean-Luc Godard made Week End, achieved a major artistic success, and then spent the next decade making left-wing agitprop and video art. Three years later, Roger Corman, after so successfully catching the '60s counterculture zeitgeist with The Wild Angels and The Trip, made his own version of Week End, failed both critically and commercially, and then spent the rest of his life producing sequels to Bloodfist. Makes you wonder what might have happened in Corman's career if things had gone…
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Peeping Tom 1960
Shocking first to see the familiar Archers logo with just Powell and not Pressburger’s name in front of it. Then even more shocking to begin with a scene of a sex worker being murdered, told from the camera’s POV, with pockets of charcoal blacks added to the usual saturated color palette. Welcome to the ‘60s.
A prescient movie. This started to be discovered about 20 years after its disastrous initial release when Martin Scorsese became its de facto sponsor, and…
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The Tales of Hoffmann 1951
Where da fuck is dis set - Doctor Parnassus's freakin Imagnarium??? Just kidding, folks.
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Manos Returns 2018
Manos: The Hands of Fate was produced far away from Hollywood by people with no understanding of how to make a movie. Its badness resonated because its complete technical ineptitude coalesced into an accidental style that matched its story. Watching it, you feel like you took a wrong turn on a highway outside El Paso and ended up at a portal to hell. Who made this? What were they thinking? Of course, the internet takes the mystery out of everything,…
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One from the Heart 1981
So here's what happened. I bought the new One from the Heart Reprise cut, and was excited to see Coppola's huge indoor Las Vegas set and Vittorio Storaro's cinematography on 4K Blu-Ray. But then I saw that the original 1981 cut was on the second disc, and thought: "Y'know what? I don't want to watch a 10-minutes-shorter version of a movie I like. Sorry Francis!" So I watched a mediocre, dated Blu-Ray transfer of the original cut and had a…
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The Road to Ruin 1934
This is a prototypical 1930s roadshow exploitation movie: a prim and proper high-school-aged woman descends into premarital sex, alcohol, and "wild parties." First she dates a clean-cut boy who (it is implied) forces himself on her, but who we're still supposed to regard as a better person than Ralph, her older lover who sends her on the titular road. She gets pregnant, and then is plied with liquor and pushed into prostitution to pay for an abortion. I will refrain…
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Eros Hotel 1979
I have a big box of DVDs of old Turkish movies, and sometimes I like to go panning for gold in there. This one leapt out at me because of its title. This is a zany softcore sex farce about several couples who visit an erotic hotel in Istanbul to spice things up. And not unlike in Gay Talese's The Voyeur's Motel, the revellers are spied upon by the hotel owner, who watches them through a closed-circuit TV system. He…
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Pecker 1998
Saw this with the man himself in attendance at Toronto's Paradise Theatre. They screened the movie with John Waters sitting at the edge of the stage doing live commentary. I like all of his movies on their own, but they would all benefit from being viewed this way, with Waters cackling at his own jokes and annotating scenes with lore like "We really have wig-snatching in Baltimore!" and the fact that the guy who plays a postman in one scene…
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Coda: Thirty Years Later 2007
With the Megalopolis premiere in the news and a new wave of Francis Ford Coppola-mania sweeping the world, now felt like a good time to watch his late wife Eleanor Coppola's behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Youth Without Youth (2007). This 65-minute work, which is included as a bonus feature on the DVD of her famous Apocalypse Now documentary, and in her introduction, she positions it as a sort-of spiritual successor.
Coming almost 10 years after his decidedly impersonal…
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Von Richthofen and Brown 1971
Roger Corman has said that Von Richthofen, a man of honour, represented for him a chivalrous past in warfare, and Brown, his younger, tougher, working-class rival on the other side, represented the darker reality of the 20th century World Wars and their mass slaughter. I’m not certain how much the nature of war has changed and how much Von Richtofen’s eyes are opened to reality; maybe a bit of both. A war movie that is intelligent and tasteful, like the man who made it, with some incredible aerial action.
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Vilde, the Wild One 1986
The most expensive Norwegian film of its day was a stunningly bleak chamber piece about incest and child abuse as tools of patriarchy in a small fishing village.
You know me, I’m not a moralist, but this has some semi-graphic abuse scenes featuring an actual child actor, and I draw a line at that. I’m not proposing any laws or any censorship, I’m just telling you where I draw the line.