Adam Baran

Fedora - So that guy is not me by the way. I’m a little baffled that the trailer for this late-Billy Wilder movie isn’t up on YouTube, but genuinely more baffled by this guy posting this clip. And by the way - Fedora is his favorite movie? Of all time? It’s sort of interesting, but…favorite? Fedora is one of those kind of small-cult classics that fags tend to champion - the rarely seen, semi-interesting forgotten films with equally forgotten actresses. I first heard about it from when I interviewed the artist Francesco Vezzoli who also counts it as one of his favorites.

Here’s what it is - Billy Wilder’s second to last movie indeed does revisit Sunset Boulevard, with a slightly different twist and half the brilliance. William Holden (a holdover, no pun intended, from Sunset Boulevard) plays a down on his luck producer, who lands on a Greek Island to track down Fedora, the legendary movie star (Garbo Revisited) with whom he once had a fling, to try and cast her in his comeback film. If he can secure her, his career is made, however when he gets there, he finds her imprisoned by a creepy Countess, and kept under watch and key by a nurse and leering chauffeur (played by Fassbinder regular Gottfried John, who was easy to spot since I’d just watched Berlin Alexanderplatz weeks earlier). He tries to unravel the mystery, and finds himself trapped in the mucky muck of a tepid flashback structure that removes all the sense of dread and doom that Sunset Blvd. hinted at. It’s sort of 70’s, and sort of fascinating to discover, but it didn’t yield all the pleasures that it clearly did for others. It’s more interesting to describe it to people who never heard of it than to get them to watch it.

Solo Con Tu Pareja - This is an early (perhaps the first) film by Alfonso Cuaron. I start to worry with Criterion whether they really legitemately felt this movie was good enough to merit their brand. It’s a mildly diverting sex comedy about a macho player whose nurse one-stand-stand gets her revenge on him by sending his HIV test results back marked “Poz.” Creepy right? Not that funny, right? There’s great cinematography, but it’s all somewhat C-grade slapstick that must have seemed dated back in the 90’s when it was first released. I guess it is like Ira Glass says about needing a long incubation period to become good, because after seeing this movie, you would never ever think Cuaron could make a film as good as Children of Men.

The Bed of the Virgin - Gorgeously filmed experimental aka French piece about a Jesus-like figure wandering around these ruinous desert landscapes with a Mary-figure. So metaphorical and strange, I couldn’t begin to understand what it was all supposed to mean, if anything. I’m trying to research it still. It does have some of the most marvelous long tracking shots - one of the lead on a donkey goes for what seems like 15 minutes. It’s also got some great Nico tracks which it uses well, particularly Desert Shore.

Brand Upon the Brain! - Guy Maddin serves up another delirious helping of mashed up silent film melodrama, breaking the fourth wall a bit by showing the film with a live narrator and foley artists, and a man who it was claimed was a live castrato, but who people told me later was lip-synching. At my screening Lou Reed narrated, and couldn’t have seemed less interested in being there. But the film was great, a weird tale of a man remembering his treacherous history under the thumb of his maniacal parents who run an isolated island orphanage. I really like Guy because he’s one of those filmmakers who never really makes a perfect film, but each film builds upon the language of the first, so that - if it’s something you respond to - the body of work itself is the great achievement rather than any individual film. I think Almodovar used to be like this in the 80’s. If you look at his early films, most of them are quite imperfect, but it was the exuberance and energy and different way of looking at the world which caught people’s attention and I think that’s why he is today regarded as a very great artist (though both he and Guy are not without their detractors.) If you have the chance, I like Guy Maddin’s collected diaries “From the Atelier Tovar.”

Mutual Appreciation - I wanted to hate this, but I found myself lying in bed with a HUGE smile the whole time I was watching this. I couldn’t make it through Funny Ha Ha, but this one really works. It really really works. It’s very simple and you get into the rhythm of the dialogue and sparse story - about a indie rocker who moves to Brooklyn with not much money but actual talent that gets to shine halfway through the movie in a very glorious scene. I would watch this again, not faint praise from me.

Black Book (Zwartzboek) - Eh. Much as I like Paul Verhoeven (which is quite a bit, despite some of his super flops like Hollow Man) this one just didn’t do it for me. What was worse was having waited so long to see it, the only place it was playing was the Quad, which is filled with decrepit old people who see no reason why they shouldn’t talk throughout the whole piece, clarifying every moment for each other. I actually went off on a pair of yentas, but only after the movie, unfortunately. Anyway, as for the movie, I mean, if you’ve seen Army of Shadows, then…. It may be arbitrary to compare it to that, but it was hard not too, seeing as how that only came out last year and concerns the same undercover/double cross themes, and does them in a more realistic and interesting way. I know that Verhoeven was not trying to do what Melville did obviously, but it’s kinda like when those Truman Capote movies came out….whoever hits first, hits best. Or some such thing.

Les Vampires - Famous old 8 hour French serial from director Louis Feuillade about a gang of can’t be killed thieves called Les Vampires, who are led by Irma Vep, as played by the legendary silent film actress Musidora. I wanted to watch this because, after sitting through Out 1 in March, which was 13 hours, and Berlin Alexanderplatz which was 15, I figured this would be like a breeze. It was. Also Les Vampires is referenced quite a bit in Out 1 and in other Rivette films there are allusions. But it’s really great and the images are surreal and eerie. I watched it over several days but it would be interesting to see it all in one, I imagine it’d only make it seem weirder.

Irma Vep - Oliver Assayas made this crazy movie about a French director, played by Jean-Pierre Laud who wants to direct a remake of Les Vampires but for reasons none of his crew or production staff understand, casts Hong-Kong action star Maggie Cheung in the lead. There’s even more weird references to Rivette in this one - Jean Pierre Laud is the star, who also starred in Out 1, which featured, as mentioned, a fair amount of references to Les Vampires. And the character Jean Pierre Laud plays is supposedly based on Rivette. It’s a very strange movie, but fun and evocative. The clip above is the final reel of what survives of the film the Jean-Pierre Laud character tries to make. Most notably, the film rekindled my love for Sonic Youth’s Karen Carpenter song “Tunic (Song for Karen)” off Goo.

Clean - Maggie Cheung is supposed to be a rock star junkie who’s villified when her junkie hubby dies of a heroin overdose. Cheung won Best Actress at Cannes for her work, but I just never bought the whole story. It’s too maudlin and soapy, and I also never bought that Cheung could have been a rock star.

Bug - Sick and hilarious. One of my favorites so far this year. Ashley Judd is really amazing. I never thought that would be a sentence I would write, especially after doing impressions of her in “Double Jeopardy” for years.

Savage Intruder - Have already blogged extensively about this before, but had to post this YouTube clip. Love it.

Assault on Precinct 13 - Mega-boring. I don’t get what’s supposed to be so great about this B-Movie from John Carpenter. It was painful to sit through.

Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS - So wrong on every level, this is a famous Nazi-exploitation film loosely based on the true tale of Isle Koch, who made luggage out of the skins of Jews, and whose lust cannot be satisfied until she meets an American German prisoner who can hold out for hours on end, but of course, his plot to overthrow the camp is well underway. It’s fucked up, majorly, but kinda classic in it’s way.

Shock (aka Beyond the Door 2) - Mario Bava’s final film starring Daria Niccolodi, Asia Argento’s mom, as a woman who’s creepy son starts to get possessed by the spirit of a former lover who may have died under mysterious circumstances. It’s a very good scary film, with great homegrown effects. Sort of like an Italian horror version of The Exorcist. Loved it.

Best of the Month: Brand Upon the Brain!
Stinkiest: Clean
Best Use of Miriam Hopkins: Savage Intruder

Since it’s Gay Pride day, and I have to blog about something, I decided to throw up three gay YouTubes. This blog is pretty gay year round, but these clips are three I thought were appropriate for today.

My favorite gay actor, Vincent Price, flubs his lines. But listen to those lines - wouldn’t you????

From Judy Garland’s last film “I Could Go On Singing,” a sort of flawed masterpiece where Judy, clearly on her last legs, improvises rants in an extremely honest performance opposite famous gay actor Dirk Bogarde. The song “By Myself,” is extremely intense, and poignant when you consider Garland died not too long after. Of course, her death is often credited in being one of the factors in the Stonewall Riots.

And finally, Southern drag mess Deaundra Peek delivers a hilarious cover of Dee-Lite’s immortal classic, “What is Love?”

I’m writing a new script these days, or at least, attempting to. It’s based on my adolescence, in the same way that Jinx! was based on my childhood. I’m not really giving anything away yet, but I am really excited about getting back into doing what fulfills me. I’m taking a different approach to the writing than my past few scripts, loosely sketching out memories and scene sketches instead of detailed outlines. I’m hoping it’ll end up being a more fluid or free-flowing way to write.

I’ve also been obsessing over This American Life, which shamefully I only discovered recently. I want to marry Ira Glass. If you can see the half-hour TV version that’s been airing on Showtime, you should. This week’s radio show was excellent too - you can podcast it on ITunes. Also I went online and there were four videos from Ira talking about storytelling techniques, related to video or radio podcasts but applicable to me as I write my script. I got a lot out of these videos - sort of a refresher of ideas presented in a smart way.

www.thisamericanlife.org

Wouldn’t it be lovely if nobody had to work ever? Or at least if I didn’t have to?

PS. Clip is from “The Lonely Lady,” Pia Zadora’s Razzie-sweeping trash masterpiece. And one of my favorite films.

Two clips comprise “Father’s Day,” the first and best sequence from George Romero and Stephen King’s EC Comics inspired collaboration “CREEPSHOW.” Enjoy!

I just love how the matriarch pronounces the word scones. I also love that disco song “Don’t Let Go” that everyone dances to while the zombie Grampa is making his way towards the house. Does anyone know what that song is? I would love an MP3 or any leads.

Night of the Comet - Boring 80’s zombie film with a pair of mall girls battling oh who cares… Mary Woronov brings a little something to the film in one of her typical character bits, but much as I love her, it didn’t keep me watching the movie.

Despair - I took in a few of the Fassbinder films that were playing at the Moma in addition to Berlin Alexanderplatz. I’d heard about this one for a long time, a strange adaptation of a classic Nabokov tale about a man who falsely believes another man is his double and sets about murdering this man so that people will think he’s died. Problem is that the other man looks nothing like him. Dirk Bogarde is superb, beyond superb really, and everything about this film is stylistically brilliant and gorgeous, but on an emotional level, I didn’t really enjoy the story. That may be my thing - I don’t particularly like Nabokov, perhaps it’s a genetic trait handed down from my father, who doesn’t really care for him either. I just found it was too oblique and emotionally distant to really care too much for the lead character. I don’t think I’m really up to the task of pulling it apart more than that - Fassbinder’s work is endlessly fascinating and I don’t pretend to understand all of it, but I’m glad saw this film just the same. It ended up providing an interesting framework to view Berlin Alexanderplatz with - the style is somewhat similar.

The Mad Miss Manton - This is a charming screwball comedy with Barbara Stanwyck, who plays a dizzy society heiress who witnesses a murder and sets out, with her debutante friends, and Henry Fonda, in their first pairing, to solve the crime, running afoul of the cops and criminals both. Pleasant and diverting, as they say.

Muriel - Alain Resnais’ masterpiece? I can’t say, I’ve not seen enough of his films. The film is a strange and fragmented (duh) story of a woman and her stepson living on a coastal town post-French-Algerian war, dealing with the painful memories of atrocities committed. See what you think.

Berlin Alexanderplatz - One of the best films I’ve ever seen. Fassbinder’s 15 hour episodic television show projected in 35mm at the Moma. It took a week to watch it all. Amazing in every single way. Gunter Lamprecht and Gottfried John and Barbara Sukowa are insanely good. Buy the Criterion DVD when it comes out this fall. You’ll be suprised how much like The Sopranos it is.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated - Not bad, but it’s like preaching to the choir. Dug the weird Massachusetts lesbian Private Eye tho (she’s pictured above).

Death Drug - Insane drug scare movie starring Miami Vice’s Philip Michael Thomas as a musician who squanders his burgeoning recording career when he gets hooked on PCP and starts hallucinating white women as black women, and his hairbrush turns into a baby alligator. It’s clear the film I saw was shot in the 70’s, as it stars the Gap Band, and then later was re-edited to include the video for Thomas’ failed single “Just the Way I Planned It,” which is the most hilariously bad video you’ll ever see. They’ve also tacked on a done-in-one-take improvised ending delivered for 15 minutes by two news reporters, probably the films producers that’s just jaw droppingly bad. Must see. “I love you Daddy!”

Alice, Sweet Alice - Strange horror film starring Brooke Shields (briefly) as a little girl who’s murdered prior to her first Communion (the film’s alternate title). Everyone is convinced her crazy sister did it, especially the fat gay slob who lives next door and is eventually murdered by cockroaches. But was it her sister who did it? Could anyone else in this cast believably prance about in a bright-yellow rain slicker and Carver style mask and busily chop up half the cast? You won’t have to look too hard to figure it out. And when you finally do you’ll hate yourself for wasting time on it. It gets really slow and boring once the mystery is solved, and then it goes on for another 20 minutes. The most interesting aspect of it for me is how influenced it clearly is by the Giallo films that people like Dario Argento were making in the late sixties and early seventies, rather than by the other American horror films of it’s era.

Jail Bait (Wildweschel) - Extremely rare Fassbinder film that throws a wrench in understanding the progression of his art, especially since this was released right after Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, which is much more luscious and beautiful in style. This was a TV production so maybe that affected how ugly it looks. Not really sure. It’s a Heavenly Creatures-esque tale about a mean little girl who starts an affair with an older boy, and when the parents have the boy arrested for rape, the little girl waits for him to get out of prison and goes out for revenge on her Dad. The acting is really wooden - even for a Fassbinder film, where most of the acting is usually stagey and wooden, this one is really wooden and hard to take. But of course, seeing this one after Berlin Alexanderplatz, there’s no way it could compare.

Red Road - A bit overhyped, this is about a woman who works as a security guard, watching the myriad cameras set up around Glasgow. She spies on a man she’s obviously been traumatized by, and sets out to set him up for rape, so he’ll be sent back to prison. It works until the third act, when it sort of cops out in a strangely uplifting redemptive ending that bears the hallmarks of the Sundance Institute, where it was developed.

Guru, The Mad Monk - Andy Milligan was one of the most highly regarded and prolific Grindhouse filmmakers - and this was real 42nd street - grade A garbage. A tale of a Mad Monk (obviously) who lives in a church on a European island with a Vampiric Nun. They agree to hide a young man and his lover from the inquisition, as long as the young man helps them bring in fresh bodies for experiments or something along those lines. Everyone talks in thick Bensonhurst accents that you just don’t hear anymore. I dug it a lot, much more than his more well known Fleshpot on 42nd St.

My Name Is Julia Ross - Rare B-Noir from Joseph H. Lewis about a woman named Julia Ross who’s recruited by an evil dowager played by Dame May Whitty and her hot-tempered switchblade happy son. Sort of a low-budget Rebecca in terms of plot, with Julia Ross being imprisoned in a seaside mansion and passed off as the son’s mentally unbalanced wife. They’re trying to get her to go so crazy she’ll kill herself, so that her son can be off the hook for killing his real wife, who nobody knows is dead. It’s very good and tight up until the ending, which doesn’t make any kind of plausible sense. Too bad though.

Grindhouse - So much has already been written about this movie that it’s hard to write about it without going over the same topics. The main thing that’s been well expounded upon is how little either film resembles an actual Grindhouse movie. The first, “Planet Terror” is, as a friend described it to me, a big-budget Troma movie, and yes it’s a zombie splatter fest, but it’s not Grindhouse in the way fake movies the faux-trailers advertise are. The second “Death Proof” is a sort of melding of Vanishing Point, which may have been a drive-in classic, but it was not a Grindhouse film. Grindhouse films spanned a wide-variety of exploitation fare - torture films, porno, mondo docs - but they always went out of their way to show the grossest possible things. If these filmmakers had to cut stuff to make it an R, by definition, neither film is true Grindhouse.

Most people I spoke to either liked the first or the second half, and hated the other. I was one of the ones who thought the first “Planet Terror” was among the best films I’d seen in a very long time. It was totally thrilling, hilariously funny, ridiculous, over-the-top, action packed, and very violent. But the second one was the pits. In retrospect, this reaction could have been a response to the fact that the first one was so exciting, while the second one had an almost anti-structure and suspense set-up, laden with standard-Tarantino dialogue. The ending is fabulous as is the first car killing sequence - hard to argue with that, but boring is boring for the rest of it. I liked how Tarantino essentially repeated the famous opening to Reservoir Dogs with his stunt-women ladies, and I admired how he slyly used the Psycho-structure, something I wasn’t expecting at all. But I don’t know if it totally worked, because in the second half of “Death Proof” it seemed like the characters talked so much about Vanishing Point I wondered if Tarantino just wrote the whole piece so that he could fit that reference in there and get people to watch one of his favorite films. Probably.

All in all, I did really liked the whole package - it’s the kind of film that sort of lends itself to fanboy obsessing and debating, you know why it’s good and why it’s bad, and that’s part of the fun to just pick it to pieces. It wouldn’t have been interesting without it’s flaws (the faux scratches and fake effects to make the film look old) so I did recommend it to lots of people who were on the fence about it.

Vanishing Point - Ok, Tarantino it worked. I watched it, and I really did like this weird little road chase movie about a speed freak on a monster drive cross state lines for no purpose. It’s strength lies in the way it distills the pure cinematic elements of a chase sequence to fit an entire movie, as well as the way it captured a more punk counter-culture spirit than Easy Rider, which is a film I was never too thrilled by.

Insatiable - I felt like watching classic porno today so I rented this Marilyn Chambers flick, just re-mastered on DVD. The pool table sequence rocks, but that’s it. It’s all a bit too arty, well, why don’t I just let Wikipedia review it for me:

“Chambers plays a rich heiress whose sexual appetite is–per the title–insatiable. The movie has no plot or storyline, and simply consists of one sex scene after another, with a few essentially pointless filler sequences added to pad the runtime to feature-length movie standards. One scene has Chambers’s character overhearing her friend having sex, but in all the other “action” scenes Chambers features more directly.

The central scene of the movie can be described as a consensual rape, where she is ravished on a billiard table by the gardener. In this scene she is obviously deep-throating the garderner, as you can clearly see a lump going up and down her throat during the scene. Although Chambers says, “No, please stop,” the movie makes it clear she is a willing participant. In the final scene of the movie, Chambers has sex with a man and a woman, followed immediately by anal sex with a rather limp John Holmes. As soon as Holmes is finished, Chambers utters her last line of the movie: “More….”

So there.

Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry - Another car chase flick referenced in Grindhouse, this one starring Peter Fonda as a thief who makes off with a load of money and a dumb broad who’s not so dumb as she looks. It suffers because it can’t decide whether its a screwball comedy or an action film or something more serious. The Grand Guignol ending (or the Easy Rider ending, depending how you look at it) where the pair escape only to drive into a moving train was so ridiculously unsatisfying I can’t recommend it.

The Lives of Others - You haven’t seen it yet? It’s so good. What’s wrong with you? It’s still at the Angelika fer Chrissakes. I saw it late and that was 2 months ago.

So what’s the pattern here this April? Well, after starting out with a zombie flick, and then quickly moving to super art-house land with the Fassbinder Moma series and Alain Resnais’ Muriel, I had to go back to the zombies and the Grindhouse. After Grindhouse, it just put me in the mood for more grindhouse movies. And then of course April ends with a big crossover art-house success. Is there a theme ? I don’t know, I’m pretty much always watching an art-house movie or a so-bad-it’s-good exploitation movie. That’s just my thing. I was thinking today of an old John Waters essay where he talks about how he wishes art-house movies were promoted with the same types of advertising as exploitation films. For Berlin Alexanderplatz the poster could read - “15 hours of German Pre-War Angst!” It was a really moving experience to see that film with an audience over a week. I became friends with a lovely little French woman and we talked about it each time we sat together. Afterwards we both needed someone to talk to so we would go over to the Burger Joint at the Le Meridien hotel, and discuss what we thought of Biberkopf and Mietzi. It’s the kind of reason I live in New York - I just don’t think you can get that in other cities. Anyway, May gets a little more varied and a little more interesting. Is anyone taking my recommendations? Comment if you are.