project717-629-119383 Reviews

Chico and the Man: Ed Talks to God (1977) Season 3, Episode 18

A Truly Chilling Detail Of Freddie Prinze's Final Hours

[10/10 · 28 January 2024]

There is not much more that can be added to the now well-documented fact that this was the last episode of "Chico And The Man" that Freddie Prinze filmed mere hours before he took his own life...other than to point out a truly chilling detail that seems to have elicited little notice or comment. In the last few minutes of the episode, Prinze asks Jack Albertson to take a large knife that he was previously using to cut his own birthday cake and hand it over, so he can stab himself to death in a "comic" gesture of apology, guilt, and self-recrimination for setting up a false imitation of "God's voice" to convince Ed that his life still has value and meaning as he grows old.

Sensations (1975)

Seminal

[10/10 · 8 December 2021]

Forget "Deep Throat". Forget "Behind The Green Door". Forget "Debbie Does Dallas". Forget "The Devil In Miss Jones".

This is the singular film that changed the entire sociological and political dynamic of hardcore pornography into a legitimate historical and cultural object by which to forever measure and study a forgotten and sexually revolutionary epoch.

The year was 1975.

The spirit, along with all the freely undulating flesh, was contained within this startling speech: "Don't be so stupid. Don't believe what they tell you. Our teachers, the priests, the television, the newspapers. It's all a trick. So they can make atomic bombs. They are the 'authorities'. And they will always have the authority to be criminals".

Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962)

After James Dean, "East Of Eden", And Elia Kazan....

[1/10 · 19 November 2021]

And despite all the lush Technicolor production values, director Martin Ritt had to of known he was doomed from the start. And really, when it comes right down to it, it's the main reason the film today is never revived and is justifiably forgotten. Truly a movie haunted by the tragic death of a 24-year-old genius on his way to a road race in the autumn of 1955.

Forty Deuce (1982)

The Early 1980's Artistic Masterpiece That Never Was

[1/10 · 6 October 2021]

This is a particularly painful viewing experience, but not for the reasons you may think. Alan Bowne, who passed away from AIDS, was one of the most astonishingly gifted and promising young playwrights at the dawn of the 1980's, a far more dangerous and important theatrical voice than either Tony Kushner ("Angels In America") or Jonathan Larson ("Rent"). As a stage play, this became an overnight sensation Off-Off Broadway in 1981 at The Perry Street Theatre, directed by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael Cristofer ("The Shadow Box") with a much more compelling and powerfully charismatic cast of actors, causing stunned audiences to reel from what they were seeing. Less about junkie teenage gay male hustlers and their Times Square pimp, and more about the unconscious desperation for any momentary or authentic recognition of sentient human feeling under the relentless oppression of free enterprise, The New York Times raved about the play and the production, describing the highly stylized dialogue as "profanity so potently over-the-top as to border on a kind of heightened and epic Shakespearean poetry". Celebrities and producers started flocking to the sold-out SRO performances; the word-of-mouth was so intense that a media frenzy started to build and the show was on it's way to Off-Broadway, and then hopefully a full-scale Broadway production along the lines of Maxim Gorky's "The Lower Depths". It was about to set the New York theatre world on fire, with standing ovations happening every night. Instead, it's legacy became this: a deservedly ignored and horrid little film, a medium that it didn't fit into or need, arranged by disgustingly idiotic and greedy backers that had no business going anywhere near something so special; it demanded only the very greatest and most insightful of talents involved, which never came to pass due to individuals who had no grasp of it's finer sociological implications and had no understanding of it's dark and prescient political power. It remains to this day one of the saddest examples of a potential theatrical masterpiece turned into forgettable Z-grade movie trash by dim-witted philistines only interested in catering to the basest voyeurism and titillation.

Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989)

Banned Literary Masterpiece Becomes Cinematic Mediocrity

[2/10 · 9 September 2021]

There is more fidelity to the underlying spirit of Hubert Selby's book ("the horrors of a loveless world") in the sad, dark, and tragic corners of 1977's classic "Saturday Night Fever" than in the entire length of this misguided, heavily compromised, and poorly conceived late 80's German-backed art-film adaptation of one of the most towering achievements of postwar 20th century American literature. It only stood a chance in the directorial hands of a William Friedkin, a Sidney Lumet, a Martin Scorsese (and even Stanley Kubrick, who actually DID want to direct it at one time) if it ever stood a chance at all, which was slim to none in terms of getting any major American studio to financially back it with a much greater screenwriter like "Fever's" Oscar-nominated and legendary enfant terrible Norman Wexler or "Taxi Driver's" Paul Schrader, and not somebody who wrote "Body Rock" with Lorenzo Lamas. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Plus a greater cast of actors, although that almost happened with Robert DeNiro in the mid 1970's, and yet not even then, at the height of a more daring filmmaking era in Hollywood. By 1989, nothing good was going to come of it, as it's window of opportunity to be a truly groundbreaking production had long since passed, in terms of the arch-conservative political changes within Hollywood by that period, and the long-gone courageousness of American filmmaking in the 1970's, of which "Fever" is explicitly one of the last remaining mainstream examples, containing sharp fragments within it's supporting characters that clearly allude to the novel's particularly brutal and inhumane world, all disco music aside. (The controversial backseat gangbang sequence in "Fever" was very likely influenced by the book.) This adaptation's underwhelming public impact is easily detectable in the garbled mediocrity of it's vision, the shocking timidity of it's sugar-coated changes from the novel, and in the overall weakness of it's execution, an outgrowth of a German producer and director whose Teutonic sensibilities were ill-suited to a specifically provincial text that inarguably required an authentic American auteur to bring out the inner psychology of it's tortured characters to a much deeper and more powerfully affecting level.

A Christmas to Remember (1978 TV Movie)

The Spirit Of James Dean Lurks In The Shadows Of This 1970's Holiday TV Film

[10/10 · 14 August 2021]

Directed by George Englund, who was one of Marlon Brando's closest friends, and one of the last scripts ever written by Stewart Stern, who wrote REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE and had a very close friendship with James Dean, this may intrigue those who have the perception to sense the ghostly shadows of Dean's spirit lurking in the subtext of Stern's 1976 adapted teleplay (boy abandoned by mother goes to live on a farm and suffers alienation of affection from paternal figure...a plot line that is a virtual prismatic double of Dean's real-life childhood circumstances with his dying mother, being sent to his aunt and uncle's Indiana farm in the late 1930's, and his distant and coldly aloof relationship with his father.). Stern wrote the script for the 1957 documentary THE JAMES DEAN STORY, so any lingering psychic residue on Stern's behalf regarding the sense of loss pervading this wintry holiday TV film is not that far-fetched, even though it's very, very subliminal. But I believe it can be easily teased out....especially in terms of the "phantom son" resolution.

The Blood Oranges (1997)

A Quote From Novelist John Hawkes, Author Of "The Blood Oranges"

[10/10 · 9 August 2021]

''My fiction,'' he goes on to say, ''is generally an evocation of the nightmare or terroristic universe in which human sexuality is destroyed by law, by dictum, by human perversity, by contraption, and it is this destruction I have attempted to portray and confront in order to be true to human fear and . . . Ruthlessness, but also in part to evoke its opposite, the moment of freedom from that constriction, from that restraint, and from death.''

The Stranger (1967)

Hell On Earth: 1967's "The Stranger" By Visconti From Camus

[10/10 · 8 August 2021]

The last scene alone doomed this extraordinary film to oblivion. A man truly free of all societal forms of illusionary human freedom becomes the truly crucified Christ of a Satanic and Hellish world. I believe with all my heart that is the reason it was never acclaimed the way it should have been....even to this day. It was "too hot to handle" in more ways than one....even in the so-called "liberated" late Sixties. A lost masterpiece of no small importance.

"Not only is Meursault innocent, he is the only authentic person in his world. His authenticity takes the form of immediate contact with existence, the only real certainty, in contrast with the false moral, religious and customary beliefs of ordinary people."--Camus

"One would therefore not be much mistaken to read "The Stranger" as the story of a man who, without any heroics, agrees to die for the truth. I also happened to say, again paradoxically, that I had tried to draw in my character the only Christ we deserve. It will be understood, after my explanations, that I said this with no blasphemous intent, and only with the slightly ironic affection an artist has the right to feel for the characters he has created."--Camus.

Permanent Vacation (1980)

"A Series Of Rooms": Jarmusch's Existentialist Masterpiece Of 1970's "No Wave" Cinema

[10/10 · 8 August 2021]

It was obvious from this debut film that Mr. Jarmusch was going to go places.....the otherworldly slow-motion gamelan music and doom-laden church bells, his strong visual Edward Hopper-like compositions, his pungent combination of a half-real yet timeless and dream-like atmosphere, a kind of sunlit and dislocated nightmare world of poverty, isolation, war trauma, and mental illness, his allusions to Camus's "The Stranger" and Lautremont's transgressive 19th century magnum opus "Maldoror", read aloud by his aimless protagonist holding a beat-up Penguin paperback which is then indifferently (and symbolically) torn up by his impassive and wrist-bandaged girlfriend ("Feed confidently on the tears and bloodcurdling cries of the adolescent! And then go and pretend you have come to help him!") the powerful sense of European cinematic style, pacing, and influence (especially Chantal Ackerman, whose last shot of 1976's "News From Home" he both stole and gave homage to) and all of it executed with a uniquely idiosyncratic and daringly original self-assurance that augured his rise to later mainstream acclaim. It remains today the crown jewel of all the "No Wave" films that came out of that short-lived underground NYC late 1970's period of CBGB's punk rock ferment, and it's no small footnote to realize that both the great Nicholas Ray, director of "Rebel Without A Cause" with James Dean, and Lazlo Benedek, director of "The Wild One" with Marlon Brando, were Jarmusch's NYU film-school mentors, men who certainly knew talent when they saw it. It is also an extraordinary sociological document of an apocalyptic and dangerous East Village Manhattan that time and politics would soon gentrify out of existence; what was gained in civic safety and urban stability was at a terrible cost to the crucial lifeblood that formed a historic and radical artistic epoch. In that particular instance, and as an inter-connected referent to that time and place, seek out Francesca Woodman's haunting and masterful photographs, a brilliant 1970's East Village artist whose tragic and suicidal fall to her death at 22 in the winter of 1981 eerily reflects the "Doppler Effect" story that is told in the film.

The Lost Coast (2008)

"The Lost Coast": Journey To The End Of The Night

[10/10 · 18 January 2020]

Despite whatever aesthetic pluses and minuses this obscure 2008 independent film by Gabriel Fleming contains (and there are arguments to be made mostly for it in terms of its extraordinary musical score, dream-like pacing, excellent performances, and exquisitely atmospheric cinematography as well as against it for its rather predictable storyline) one cannot help oneself from becoming pulled in and fascinated by the strange and disturbing undertones beneath this tale of painfully unrequited and deeply repressed passions that takes place in a flashback-laced but mainly dusk-to-dawn period on a Halloween night in San Francisco, suffused with what appears to be the factual actualities of youthful and tragic early death, serving as an overriding metaphor for a personal and inevitable loss of innocence. Notice, if you will, the emphatic presence of a wall poster of legendary goth band Joy Division (23-year-old lead singer Ian Curtis committed suicide in 1980), the quick, subtle cuts to on-rushing emergency 911 vehicles, and the casual remarks about wanting to die before reaching the age of 30, including the obvious visual signifiers of skeletons, ghosts, and most significantly a haunting and expressively funereal mask that essentially acts as the film's Greek chorus and central symbolic conceit (the covering over of true feelings, the false façade of gender roles and identities, the burial of past secrets) as our four main characters wander aimlessly through the anonymous and party-packed city streets in search of an indefinable and increasingly desperate "good time", eventually stumbling on to the abandoned corpse of a young man in the middle of Golden Gate Park under an ice-blue moon in the last and lonely hours of the fading holiday. Their nocturnal (if not metaphysical) journey from crowded urban spaces towards the liberating primal landscape of the forest allows tortured revelations to finally rise to the surface along with a rainy and emotionally cleansing November morning. Thoughts drift back to the night actor River Phoenix died on the streets of West Hollywood in the early morning hours of Halloween 1993, and whether or not that particularly tragic and generation-defining moment in time was on the mind of the director, one cannot help but ponder its relation to both the body in the park and one of the climactic lines of dialogue at the break of dawn ("the sun wont be rising for us") that surrounds its main theme of heartbreak, psychological self-deception, and the deep and lasting scars of societal and sexual hypocrisy.

Party Girl (1958)

A X-Ray Vision Into A Great Director's Troubled Psyche

[10/10 · 27 August 2019]

One of the great lost masterpieces by "Rebel Without A Cause" director Nicholas Ray , this 1958 film is especially fascinating if it is interpreted as a powerful indictment of Hollywood power and corruption, especially in light of the fact that it was shot a mere three years after James Dean, star of "Rebel", had been tragically killed. If one were to view it through that prism of understanding (seeing Robert Taylor as a stand-in for Ray himself, Lee J. Cobb as the ruthless head of a studio, and Cyd Charisse as a female metaphor for Dean, with "the face of an angel") the film takes on a much deeper and autobiographical dimension, becoming downright chilling. As further proof of this theoretical reading of the film, make special notice of Charisse's vivid red outfits: similar to the iconic red windbreaker that Dean wore in "Rebel", and a telling symbol of a tragic loss that Ray never really recovered from.

The Great Bank Hoax (1977)

Joesph Jacoby's 1978 Watergate Allegory Is A Lost And Evocative Gem

[10/10 · 26 June 2019]

Discovering this film is tantamount to feeling like an archaeologist coming across an extraordinary fossil of unknown origin: directed by a treasured old friend of Martin Scorsese, produced by the acclaimed editor of Sidney Lumet's "The Pawnbroker" and several Woody Allen comedy classics, starring a then newly re-discovered Burgess Meredith after 1976's "Rocky" had brought him back into the public eye, with Ned Beatty of "Network" and "Deliverance" fame and the venerable Richard Basehart, Micheal Murphy, the forgotten Paul Sand, and beautiful Constance Forslund and lovely Charlene Dallas rounding out the cast. But this alone does not begin to describe the particularly strange and noteworthy qualities of "The Great Bank Hoax", for it appears to be a movie existing in an alternate and twilight-set universe of it's very own. Shot on location in the small town of Madison, Georgia, there is a sense of almost vivid suffocation and claustrophobia pervading every square inch of the film's atmosphere, most specifically it's prison cell-like spaces with actors crammed into tiny curtained backrooms, teller's cages, and dimly-lit storage closets, it's empty and economically depressed Jimmy Carter-era Main Street with it's sad and bored high school orchestra and threadbare Fourth of July parade, it's rotting and isolated clapboard church ministered by a corrupt priest and surrounded by overgrown trees and forlorn stained glass windows, it's black-walled bingo parlor, lonely rooming houses, cracked country backroads, and dingy old motels, and most specifically it's melancholic and very off-kilter comic tone fueling it's allegorical Watergate satire, neither slapstick or laugh-out loud funny, but more of an aching and ill-defined humorous desperation, representing both the film's November 1978 release date and the waning days of that decade's diminishing faith in any sense of institutional post-Nixonian reform or improvement, a snapshot in time before the rise of a neo-conservative revolution that would sweep a fundamentalist Republican into the White House a mere 24 months later, leading directly towards our own present-day drama of 21st-century global malaise. Beneath it's surface of scheming females, bumbling bankers, and phony Christians lies one of the last remaining anti-establishment comedies that would quickly flourish and then disappear in the aftermath of the classic "Animal House", so it behooves any dedicated film historian to unearth and appreciate it's unique and singularly eccentric charms.