Adam Baran

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.