Not Coming to a Theater Near You
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
The aftermath of seeing Tommy Wiseau’s curious masterpiece with a near-capacity audience is one strewn in a mess of plastic spoons, trampled rose petals, and hangovers.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: 35mm print
29 Jun 2009 6:37 PM | Submit Comment
That Brad Neely’s uncannily witty, hilarious bastardization of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is in every qualitative measure superior to the film proper is a testament to the potential of viral art. Read more here, watching the opening scene here, and download the audio here.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: bootleg DVD
29 Jun 2009 6:24 PM | Comments (1)
Tracy the Outlaw is a silent Western from 1928. Based on a true story, the film follows Harry Tracy as bad luck and circumstance change him from a run-of-the-mill cowpoke to a feared outlaw. An independent production by Foto Art Productions, Tracy the Outlaw doesn’t look like most movies we remember from that same year — it neither has the artistic touches of Victor Sjostrom’s The Wind, the style of The Docks of New York, or any of the technical or narrative polish that was the Hollywood standard by that time. 10 years behind the times, it feels like sometime made in the mid-teens, when features were just getting established and filmmakers were still feeling their way around the format. And that’s exactly why Tracy the Outlaw is important: Hollywood isn’t everything, and outside of it were independent producers and distributors, making raw, unkempt, flawed, and wonderful movies. Its obtuseness is its charm — it doesn’t abide by the rules that were standard. The action sequences follow their own rhythm, their own editing patterns. And its characters don’t always act like they would in a Hollywood production. The ending of Tracy the Outlaw is unexpectedly bleak, making no compromises with its characters or their actions.
by Cullen Gallagher | Source: Videobrary VHS
24 Jun 2009 11:30 PM | Submit Comment
The word I thought of when finishing this film was “streamlined.” In comparison to today’s action films, the premise is simple (“Save the president.”); the plot moves relentlessly with no distractions, flashbacks, exposition, or unnecessary complications; and the ending is a blissfully concise climax. When Snake, our taciturn hero (Kurt Russel) makes it to his finish line as the time runs out, there’s none of the usual tiresome flickering-numbers, shaking-camera, down-to-the-microsecond nonsense. Instead, he’s relieved of his suicide device, takes a breath, and then checks the timer. Two seconds to spare. TWO SECONDS! He should have picked up a sandwich or something.
Not that it spares the badassery. We get only tantalizing hints of Snake’s criminal history through an eyepatch, a cobra tattoo emerging from his waistband, and a few muttered words about “Leningrad” (remember when the cold war seemed like an inevitable part of the future?). Isaac Hayes is perfect as the “Duke of New York,” driving around in a sweet Caddy outfitted with multiple chandeliers. Harry Dean Stanton is irreplaceable as Brain, the two-timing con man. And though the film was done on a relative shoestring, the choice to film in an actual bombed-out city (East St. Louis) makes for a chillingly convincing post-apocalyptic hellscape. The set pieces, too, are nearly eerie in their resourcefulness. The first thing Snake stumbles on is a group of convicts, many in drag, others playing junk instruments, putting on a musical. He’s put in the ring for a boxing match in Grand Central Station with what looks like an old-school circus strongman. The Duke’s first mate, a fey, David-Bowie type, confronts the police with stubs of the president’s severed fingers. With no explanation of who he is and whose fingers he has, he simply drawls, “You touch me, he dies. You’re not in the air in thirty seconds, he dies. You come back in, he dies. Twenty seconds. Nineteen.” The entire film is as sleek and weird and accomplished.
At the end of the movie, Snake returns to the police commissioner, who he’d promised to kill at the beginning of the film. “You going to kill me?” the commissioner asks. “Nah. I’m too tired,” Russel says. That’s right, Snake. You take a motherfucking NAP. Well deserved.
by Katherine Follett | Source: MGM DVD
12 Jun 2009 3:58 PM | Comments (3)
You have to treat the swamp right if you expect to survive in it.
The daughter from Diff’rent Strokes and her mute brother T-Fish find themselves stranded in the middle of Boggy Creek during the worst storm a small southern community has ever known. And somewhere nearby, lurking, watching, is the local Sasquatch. A sequel in title only to the ponderous, documentary-style The Legend of Boggy Creek, Return is a lighthearted monster yarn for the whole family. Where Legend spends its running time delving into the roots of the monster myth, Return takes it for granted that the creature exists. And instead of presupposing the beast to be a source of terror to be avoided at all costs, here we have an animal of wondrous mystery, a being that is simply part of a fascinating and unknown world. In other words, it’s an adventure fable told through the eyes of kids—the story of a world in which a girl and her brother can outfish the most experienced angler in town, a world in which a reclusive man-beast might not be all bad, a world in which everything works out right in the end. Not frightening for a minute, and sure to let down enthusiasts in search of gruesome Bigfoot carnage, the film is nevertheless immensely enjoyable Saturday-afternoon fare.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: CBS/FOX Video VHS
06 Jun 2009 7:47 PM | Submit Comment
Unusual pseudo-documentary about the legendary swamp monster of Fouke, Arkansas. Comprised of interviews with folks who claim to have seen or heard the beast and dramatizations of famous encounters, the film is a poorly produced jumble of local flavor and disjointed digressions, with a smattering of voice-over narration thrown in to offer a semblance of narrative structure. Though the rough footage and lack of story do give the film an appreciated sense of authenticity, more so, say, than the similarly themed The Legend of Bigfoot, long stretches of tedious rambling and groundless speculation continually make us wish something substantial would happen.
There are some bright spots along the way, however, episodes that genuinely draw us into this world and pique our interest of its inhabitants. The first-hand accounts by the old hermit who lives down by the creek, for instance, are highly entertaining. As man who has shunned society for years, having spent the majority of his life in the midst of the monster’s stomping grounds, he comes across as the most credible voice in the entire film—a man who knows the wilderness and knows what lives in it. Unexpectedly, he does not believe that the creature exists. The inclusion of such a character reinforces the idea that the makers of this film were more interested in documenting assorted accounts of the legend than presenting a well-structured and entertaining argument for the creature’s existence. In other words, it’s not really suppose to be a movie, in the structured-story-arc, engrossing-character-development sense of the word. I don’t know if that completely justifies minute after minute of directionless hillbilly blather, but it helps.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Lightning Video VHS
06 Jun 2009 5:59 PM | Submit Comment
As grotesque, unsettling, and sad as the image of its title would indicate, Hobo Clown seems to realize in claymation what artist Allison Schulnik has already been pursuing in paint: ambiguous (if not quite scary) clowns viewed as if through Francis Bacon’s kaleidoscope. Like the bulky, animalistic figure of the Hobo Clown himself, the intent of the film is not quite clear, suggesting whole narrative possibilities (and cultural references, from Jimmy Stewart to Shakes to Killer Klowns from Outer Space), but mainly emphasizing the craft of the claymation itself. Swirling colors form and reform the Hobo Clown’s eye-balls (or, to be more precise, black, vacant eye-cavities), a model clown head rotates and mutates, and a dreamy, flowery interlude hints at something rather more joyful (to the tune of a very nice, but seemingly arbitrary Grizzly Bear song). Like clowns (and hobos), the film has the curious effect of simultaneously inviting and denying empathy.
Schulnik’s film, painting, and other work can be viewed at her website.
This was one of a dozen excellent animated shorts featured at Rooftop Films’ Dark ‘Toons program last Friday. For the curious, Rooftop’s next night of animation will be on June 10th in Brooklyn.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Digital Projection
02 Jun 2009 1:55 AM | Submit Comment
Artist and animator Hayley Morris’s stop-motion short concerns a wizened, colorless old man adrift in a sea of rolling silk, menaced by buzzing threads as he fishes for fragments of a lost world. Grim, gorgeous, and genuinely touching, Morris’s film evokes the blurring of memory with age, the tangle of connections to a treasured, but unreachable past.
The metaphor is a great deal subtler in Morris’s film than I’m probably making it sound, and it’s made all the more affecting by the characterization of the old man: a soft, wrinkled ball of fleshy wax that expresses great longing and regret by simply blinking.
This was one of a dozen excellent animated shorts featured at Rooftop Films’ Dark ‘Toons program last Friday. For the curious, Rooftop’s next night of animation will be on June 10th in Brooklyn.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Digital Projection
02 Jun 2009 1:36 AM | Submit Comment
Argentine artist Blu constructed this mindblowing short from thousands of pieces of graffiti, painted and re-painted, shot sequentially to suggest the movement of a series of figures (and cubes and insects and mutants) across the walls of Buenos Aires. The feat itself is impressive, but the execution is still more astonishing, painting a cosmic allegory of urban dread and postmodern decay literally onto the city’s walls. Blu’s recurring figures (reminiscent of the work of Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz) are of varying sizes and increasingly puzzling provenance, and they traverse their two-dimensional, two-tone landscape with a single intent: survival. It’s a brutal vision of nature that’s leavened by the glimpses of vibrant, three-dimensional city life around them—and by the sheer audacity of the film’s creation.
Watch the film – immediately – here.
This was one of a dozen excellent animated shorts featured at Rooftop Films’ Dark ‘Toons program last Friday. For the curious, Rooftop’s next night of animation will be on June 10th in Brooklyn.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Digital Projection
02 Jun 2009 1:24 AM | Submit Comment
Demonstrating an unlikely degree of cool, TIME magazine voted this film by Adam Pesapane (a.k.a. PES) the #2 viral video of last year. But don’t be put off just because the old folks at TIME beat you to it—Western Spaghetti is an ingenious film of pop-cultural/pop-cuisinart metamorphosis, turning candy corn into flame, bubble-wrap into boiling water, and pixie-sticks into tri-color pasta. Something like Pee-wee Herman’s notion of homecooking, PES’s film is wonderfully textural, reconfiguring recognizable consumer products as vernacular objects, partly stripping them of their status as simple ciphers for crass commercialism. The effect is, for some reason, quite mouth-watering. At least, if your mouth was raised in America in the 1980s.
Watch it for yourself here on PES’s website, where you can also sample such films as Pee-Nut, which I will let you experience for yourself.
This was one of a dozen excellent animated shorts featured at Rooftop Films’ Dark ‘Toons program last Friday. For the curious, Rooftop’s next night of animation will be on June 10th in Brooklyn.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Digital Projection
02 Jun 2009 1:08 AM | Submit Comment
In Forestry, a Japanese animator known as Woodpecker proffers a vision of the woodland quotidian as charming, maddening, and obscure as one might expect from a filmmaker with such a name. Rendered in a style that’s reminiscent of the cloying plasticity of Gumby and Davey & Goliath, this wordless, jaunty tale concerns a couple who must defend themselves from a mysterious, bubbling substance (represented by multicolor cotton-balls) that gushes from the mouth of a cycloptic tree. While riding a bear through the forest, the woman is herself transformed into a malevolent evergreen, while her mate (picking mushrooms with his rabbit friends) becomes the target of arboreal terror.
Or something. Explaining this sylvan, psychotropic sitcom would strip it of its weird, oneiric charm – which is driven forward by a score of relentless country finger-picking – so it’s probably best to leave well enough alone.
This was one of a dozen excellent animated shorts featured at Rooftop Films’ Dark ‘Toons program last Friday. For the curious, Rooftop’s next night of animation will be on June 10th in Brooklyn.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Digital Projection
02 Jun 2009 12:46 AM | Submit Comment
