Not on DVD

[G.C.R]

Cool! I recently got rid of a compiation of terrible cartoons that I bought for about 2 bucks because it had Scrub me Mama with a Boggie Beat on it, which I'd often read about in conjuction with Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarfs (racist cartoons ahoy).
now I'm thinking about it, and free associating, I think that comp had Cobweb Hotel on it, which in turn is making me think about Woodland Cafe, which i always felt Cobweb hotel was just an inferior version of. Check out the sexy little Betty Boop style fly!
 

[auto-da-fey]

also, this is part of the monthly Andrew's Video Vault series that tends toward the un-DVD'd. I am despondent over missing Abel Ferrara's Go-Go Tales last month, but browsing this year's schedule, I am convinced that May holds the most brilliant programming I've ever seen--

MAY 13, 2010

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942 / 88 minutes)  The Mercury Theatre’s second movie is Orson Welles’ adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s novel about a wealthy family’s decent into ruin and the rise of the automobile.  With indelible performances from Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Dolores Costello, Joseph Cotton and Tim Holt.

American Babylon (1987 / 79 minutes)  Roger Michael Watkins’ penultimate film as ‘Richard Mahler’ presents two sexually dysfunctional married couples as an allegory of late Twentieth Century living.  With Bobby Astyr, Michael Gaunt, Tish Ambrose and Taija Rae.

--which quietly takes for granted your awareness that Richard Mahler directed HARDCORE PORNOGRAPHY. I will be fascinated to see how that plays for the crowd.

I went to this a while back, and it was incredible--aside from the overstated Oedipal dynamic in The Magnificent Ambersons, it is one impeccable film, just sharp as all hell on every level. And pairing it with American Babylon--thematically linked in its examination of familial rot and decay--was a perfect touch. A large segment of the audience left--first when it began with graphic hardcore shots, then when it became clear the film was going to torment its pornhouse audience with promises but almost no delivery of erotic content (most of the graphic stuff comes from black-and-white stag films that a mentally unbalanced husband screens all day while his wife tries to seduce their neighbor--without a full-on sex act ever transpiring between them). The whole film is a drab, depressing, blackly funny act of resistance against conventional porn viewers who just want a quick release, and even more than Jess Franco, I am convinced that the time is completely ripe--what with Shortbus, Brown Bunny, Nine Songs, etc. garnering their accolades--for a reclaiming/revaluation of Richard Mahler's bleak porn-consumes-itself oeuvre. I mean, there's a scene where the two guys just sit in this sterile diner and talk about nothing that Sam Shepard or even Cassavetes probably would love, and here it is buried in this bitter little film from one of the worst periods in porn history, the mid-80s.

[auto-da-fey]

Does anyone have thoughts on Chantal Akerman's work in the 1980s? Almost none of it is available on R1 DVD, but I milked interlibrary loan to get a few beat-to-hell VHS tapes (from Wesleyan and Castleton State College in Vermont--I kind of love seeing where these come from), and I wasn't feeling it.

Toute une Nuit, from 1982, is basically 90 minutes of short vignettes that offer a cross-section of lovers' moments over the span of a night. I guess there's something formally interesting about the only sustained character being Love or something, but I didn't find the film particularly engaging--it clearly set the model for things like Jarmusch's Night on Earth, but honestly I'd take that (second-rate Jarmusch) over this in a second.

Then Les Annees 80, which I know people admire, was a bunch of rehearsal footage for her later musical, capped off by a few full numbers. Again, I just couldn't see the substance beneath the formalism--it seems to be begging critics to pontificate about its materialist history of the cinema that lays bare the invisible labor erased by the gaze of the camera lens or something, and kudos to her for that I suppose, but I like her 1970s work far more.

[coldforge]

Laying bare the invisible labor eraased by the gaze  of the camera lens is the first step to full rights for workers everywhere, including invisible key grips and invisible best boys.

[auto-da-fey]

My efforts to extricate myself from the entanglements of the internet have been going alright of late, though they preclude me from indulging in posts like this. Fortunately, trying to avoid conversation in an efficiency apartment by burrowing into my laptop supersedes that! So:

We were driving through New Jersey last week when we passed this video store with a liquidating-our-stock sign. M asked if I wanted to stop, I shrugged and said sure, and to my surprise, she whipped a u-turn and parked. Normally, these are the kind of things I salivate over, but extenuating circumstances included a) we were en route to meet friends who had food and alcohol; b) the true gold-rush years of video-store VHS-tape raiding were really 2002-2003 anyway, and I just don't expect that much anymore; and c) this was located in Princeton, which is not exactly lacking the sort of cultural capital that makes for rapid depletion of the hidden gems.

So I went in without many expectations. Browsed the VHS shelf, found an old 80s Roger Moore thriller with Elliott Gould that I'd never seen (The Naked Face) and the big-box 70s Tom Selleck sleazathon Terminal Island that I lovingly recall from nearly twenty years ago. Thought that was a solid haul, got ready to go . . .

. . . then realized the VHS rack was only one of many, stretching all the way back into the adults-only room. Holy shit. To radically abbreviate a potentially much more obsessive chronicle of its holdings (because I'm now clear to claim my makeshift bed and pass out), it was a treasure trove of precisely the sort I always hope for in this cases and almost never actually encounter. I walked out with ten movies, from the aforementioned ones to a copy of Ken Park that'll make good gifting material, to the sweaty-trucker 70s gay porn flick Grease Monkeys, to the deeply-out-of-print but gripping 1973 documentary Manson. Also the 1983 VHS version of Radley Metzger's 1975 porn film The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann, which is the last time that film's been released uncut in any format in the U.S. And, I dunno, a few more I guess. For two bucks each. So, that was pretty cool. 

[davy]

I am happy for you! Reminds me of the first time I visited Wax Trax in Denver.