Not on DVD

[Thermofusion]

the warm embrace of Charles Bronson

this is great

[Andrew_TSKS]

your encyclopedic LPTJ knowledge fails you! I posted about it in November 2006, apparently in place of masturbating:

Disappointed by Netflix's refusal to facilitate my wankery, I returned to the warm embrace of Charles Bronson. Alas, Mr. Majestyk, despite a script by Elmore Leonard, isn't quite as compelling as The Mechanic. It begins promisingly, with CB running a melon farm and treating Latino migrant workers fairly, which irks local labor bosses, but then it all descends into mafioso cliches. Ah well, maybe better luck tomorrow with Clint Eastwood in The Eiger Sanction.

funny, I actually remember it more warmly than that.

I'll bet I commented on it at the time very similarly and forgot about it sometime in the intervening years. I do forget stuff sometimes, even if my reputation says otherwise.

[auto-da-fey]

Wow, Milestones blew me away. Robert Kramer and John Douglas made it in 1975, this huge, epic unspooling of the American social fabric in the wake of the 60s, with over 50 characters, mostly radicals in search of a viable praxis after the disintegration of The Movement as an imagined unity. Which sounds all rigidly theory-driven, but what makes it so amazing is the incredible abundance of humanness--I think when I posted about Kramer's Ice I mentioned being impressed with the emphasis on dialogue and negotiation, and it's the same here--it's a talky film, but full of interesting, intelligent people attempting to forge senses of family and community in a national context where they feel left behind by history, the revolutionary moment having clearly passed. There are parents deliberating over whether to raise their children in communes, labor organizers wondering whether it's still worth it, a guy coming out of prison after working in the draft-dodger underground, and they're all just trying to figure shit out, in interweaving and intersecting verite-style stories. It's like Altman, if Altman actually liked his characters (it's also a bit like Old Joy and Wendy & Lucy--it could absorb them both and barely burp, though).

There are a few minor missteps, but the scope is breathtaking--it's shot from the Lower East Side to the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Badlands to Taos, and it's more cinematic than it sounds--the directors have an incredible eye for spatial composition, managing to forge this non-romanticized Americana of railyards and rivers and tenements and nudist colonies. I try not to get caught up in the hype of immediate memory, but I think this is one of my ten favorite films of the 1970s, my favorite decade in film history. That it's been completely forgotten, never released on any home-viewing format, and barely even attended in its new 35mm restoration is a real loss for cinema.

[Andrew_TSKS]

Ah, Christ. Is there expected to be any sort of release anytime in the future? I really want to see that now.

[auto-da-fey]

on the hopeful side, this old guy who sat by me and said he was a close friend of (the now deceased) Kramer suggested there were plans, and the restored print does bode well.

OTOH, the old guy seemed a little crazy, and this was seriously sparsely attended (because I had made the film such an event in my own mind, and because Tarkovsky's Stalker had sold out last week, I got there a bit early, but maybe a quarter of the seats were ever filled, if that; while this was Saturday at 3:15, the chatty elderly gent told me that the Friday night screening fared poorly, too), so that might put a damper on any distributional ambitions, I'm not sure.

I hope it gets released, though (although seeing it on the big screen was definitely the best way). It plays again on Thursday, I'd urge people to go.

[auto-da-fey]

you know, I do have a shit-quality bootleg of it, come to think, but it must not be R1, because it won't play on my DVD player, which is the main reason I hadn't seen it until today. I'd be glad to send my boot, but I don't think it's worth seeing that way, honestly.

[Andrew_TSKS]

I'll consider that. I think I can get my laptop to play any region, but I am not entirely sure, so it might not be worth it for me anyway.

[auto-da-fey]

saw another Kramer film yesterday, The Edge. it's from 1967 and kind of a dry run for Ice--member of young radical group decides to assassinate LBJ and they all discuss this at great length--with dry being the key word; the film has the aged-parchment textual crunch that I suppose befits a group of non-countercultural tie-wearing revolutionaries who literally walk around reading Kropotkin passages at one another. I hate to be a philistine, and I'm sure Kramer was making tactical decisions to avoid bestowing personality on his characters because subjectivity is so bourgeois maaan, but what this translates to in terms of sitting in a theater and observing for 102 minutes is a decent amount of critical/intellectual engagement ("huh, this came out the same year as La Chinoise, wonder if it contributed to Godard ditching the colorful radical chic and embracing the grating turgidity?" if that can be called intellectual or engaged)  and a more generous heaping of boredom. that's okay, he was just warming up.

[auto-da-fey]

just realized I hadn't posted about Route One/USA and that, for once, someone out there actually cares about my capsule-blather. It wasn't what I expected (a scathing anti-Reagan diatribe, basically), and it wasn't quite on par with Milestones, but still a wholly engrossing 255 minutes. It's a documentary structured around a semi-fictional character ("Doc," who's been in Africa for ten years; Kramer is kind of a character too, acknowledged behind the camera and sometimes heard) returning to the U.S. in 1988 and taking stock. Predictable cultural references are almost entirely absent--it's no "I Hate the 80s," with Rambo or Transformers or Carebears or Garbage Pail Kids--which is where Kramer's background in the radical Newsreel group is most felt: his late-80s America is prolife Pat-Robertson-for-President campaigners in Maine, black kids in Connecticut projects, Latino immigrants learning English in D.C., and an old white reporter in Georgia who's been shot in the face but keeps at it. Kramer delivers some vivid scenery, but it's definitely not a skylines-n-highways travelogue; his interest is more in the various social relations that weld together the long stretch of pavement he traverses. It's not constant motion, either--long sections in Bridgeport, Bushwick, Fort Bragg, and Miami act as chapters unto themselves and recenter the geographical narrative of the U.S., too. No overt thesis guides the film, but I think it can be read as an essay on citizenship and how modes of being a citizen are shaped by the material conditions of one's lived social reality--but that might just be me projecting in from extratextual baggage.

when it ended, I'd been sitting in a crowded (this one actually drew a crowd! w00t!), fairly muggy theater for over four hours, and I didn't really want it to stop.

lastclearchance had a very nice summary of it; I'll let him post it if he wants. we couldn't tell whether hannah's brother was there.

[lastclearchance]

lastclearchance had a very nice summary of it; I'll let him post it if he wants.

I think you should post it because I don't remember what I said! 

After the screening, adf and I were talking about the juxtaposition of the personal and the mechanical (e.g. the Taylorized construction of sets of the game Monopoly), in this sort of exploratory way, and I realized that a lot of the movie struck me as sort of a mega-string of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood segments, especially with regard to Doc as interlocutor. This was true not only of sequences in which Doc visits Walden Pond, various Philadelphia historical landmarks, etc., but also in the kind and interested approach Doc had towards all those he encountered. Kramer's politics were certainly felt, but in a much milder way. It seemed that (through Doc) he was trying to explore a national* sense of economic hopelessness, and how that led people to respond. The difference between, say, the Pat Robertson folks and the Bridgeport soup kitchen volunteers was simply an interpretive lens. 

A third reason that I thought of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood is that the film felt simultaneously timeless and dated. The film spent a lot of time at the (then-new) Vietnam War Memorial and at Fort Bragg where recruits were training, but Doc's interlocution of the military sequences was entirely Vietnam-focused (as I suppose would befit a character who is looking backwards in time) but which was very odd in terms of foreshadowing (or not) the Gulf War. Earlier, in the Bridgeport sequences, I could sense the lack of 90s rap as a cultural force (graffiti was prevalent but the many children who appeared before the camera weren't students of NWA, Biggie, 50, etc., for lack of a less clumsy way of putting it. Those are just two examples of what to this 2009 viewer were conspicuous absences that highlighted the extent to which 1989 was a lynchpin year.

Sidenote: I was personally most fascinated by the Bridgeport parts because I spent much of my childhood in the neighboring town (Stratford) and it was interesting to see how much has changed and how much has stayed the same. (girl, you in particular will be unsurprised to hear that the topics under discussion included white flight (though never by that name), "downtown revitalization," and public school funding (this of course was before Sheff v. O'Neill). Also there was a whole bit about a black activist whose name I can't remember who was planning to run for mayor in 1989 (against incumbent Democrat Thomas Bucci). I don't know how far into the race he got but I do know the eventual winner by a large margin was Mary Moran, who tried to have the city file for bankruptcy. She of course was succeeded by Joe Ganim.)

Thinking about it now, I'm realizing that though it may not have been meant as an anti-Reagan diatribe at the time, it certainly works to puncture the currently reigning myth that everyone was prosperous in the 80s. Of course, as always it the case with this sort of thing, the only people with any desire to see it probably have no need to be convinced of this.

Anyway it was really good.

*on the Eastern seabord anyway

[girl]

I would've liked to have seen that with you guys. I don't actually have anything to contribute as I can't recall ever having actually been to Bridgeport.

[lastclearchance]

Anyway, I went to a used book sale today and there were a number of VHS tapes that I considered picking up. Today they were double-price ($2) so I only bought Wraith, which I was too excited about to risk letting someone else buy it before I went back. But they will drop to $1 tomorrow and Sunday, 50¢ Monday, and free on Tuesday (if they're still there), so does anyone have any opinions on the following? (I have listed them in descending order of likelihood of me buying them.)

From Hell to Victory (1979), which follows the lives of six friends through World War II in France;
Pure Luck (1991), a remake of Le Chèvre starring Danny Glover and Martin Short;
West Beirut (1998), a coming-of-age story set during the 1975 civil war in Beirut;
Malone (1987), starring Burt Reynolds as an ex-CIA hitman;
Street Hero (1984), a bad-boy-turned-good Australian coming-of-age flick

[girl]

My thought is that there are worse ways to spend $5. I'd go back tomorrow and buy them all. Hell, I might even find five more and spend $10. VHS party at lcc's!

[Ignatius]

Thanks for the posts, adf and lcc. You are the siskel and ebert for films i cannot and will not see.

Bridgeport has a Moonie school and a minor league hockey team called the Sound Tigers (great name), and that's about all I know. Also it holds this space in my head as the paragon of a certain type of city. This small- to mid-sized formerly industrial city whose suburbs decline relatively slowly while the core rots away altogether. I didn't really notice that until I went out to the midwest and small cities were far enough apart that a depressed one really feels like a sinking ship, rather than a weak point in a relatively healthy network.. I hope that made sense, I'm not sure how to express myself here.

Both of your posts make me want to see this more. It's interesting that you mentioned the absence of cultural references, adf. When I was younger and we'd drive up and down our own stretch of US 1, the stores and diners always seemed totally frozen but anonymous, and not in a generic McDonaldsy way. Holdout Rock Bottom department stores and Long John Silver clones and things like that were everywhere - you just couldn't imagine any sort of  familiarity to casual passersby keeping those places in business, or any sort of neighborhood attachment. It was like they were there because nothing happened that was culturally strong enough (not even Rambo) after a given point in time to force those kinds of places to update themselves. I'm sorry if I don't make much sense.

[Andrew_TSKS]

Thanks for the posts, adf and lcc. You are the siskel and ebert for films i cannot and will not see.

Bridgeport has a Moonie school and a minor league hockey team called the Sound Tigers (great name), and that's about all I know. Also it holds this space in my head as the paragon of a certain type of city. This small- to mid-sized formerly industrial city whose suburbs decline relatively slowly while the core rots away altogether. I didn't really notice that until I went out to the midwest and small cities were far enough apart that a depressed one really feels like a sinking ship, rather than a weak point in a relatively healthy network.. I hope that made sense, I'm not sure how to express myself here.

That made perfect sense. You're talking about places like Cleveland and Detroit and Gary and Baltimore. Know all about it.

[Ignatius]

Just about - those regions where there are all these satellite cities that once had their own independently strong economies that busted. But the immediate suburbs can always depend on the next city down the line and in Bridgeport's case (and many others in southern CT, Westchester, New Jersey), that ultimately comes down to NYC. The opposite that I was talking about is something like Wheeling, WV. When a place like that is done, it really seems done. There's nowhere else quite close enough to depend on.

[auto-da-fey]

last night I watched 80 Blocks from Tiffany's on Google Video (it's a crappy dub, but all you're gonna find anywhere as far as I know). It's a 1979 documentary about gangs ("clubs," they still call themselves) in the South Bronx, and it exhibits a lot of that retroactively-conspicuous absence that lcc mentioned in regard to Route One/USA above--filming in the late 70s, the full-scale crack-and-Reagan-fueled militarization of both gangs and police hadn't yet occurred, so the film often emphasizes the sense of community in the physical wasteland of the area (though without shying away from the unsavory aspects of gang life), and hip-hop culture remained in its nascent stage too and is barely visible or audible. It's clearly sympathetic to the kids, but it doesn't demonize the cops either--there are some actual community police here, the kind that Carver grew into being in The Wire.

not really a masterpiece of documentary filmmaking, but a valuable look at a particular moment in time and place whose existence and memory would be wiped out pretty quickly by the 80s.

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

I've been in a long self-imposed exile from the anime world because I could no longer interact with its inhabitants without sort of sneering, and that is a terrible attitude to have toward anybody.

It's caused me to forget a great deal, the exile, of what I enjoyed when I was so deeply entrenched that I waited in rapt attention for a few select sites to update with reviews.

I remember falling for the work of two directors: Hideaki Anno and Mamoru Oshii. Anno directed the second half of End of Evangelion, which is a rough list of qualities I love in film: it's nonsensical, dream-like and features deliriously happy songs scoring some pretty malevolent behavior.

Oshii was the first director I ever encountered that others in the field described as "difficult." This was due to his love of extended shots of sleeping dogs. He directed Ghost and the Shell and he wrote Jin-Roh, but my favorite of his movies has always been his most, um, nonsensical and dream-like: Angel's Egg.



Which is no longer available here on any sort of purchasable format. It's on Youtube, though, for those interested. I find it hard to explain what it's about or why I like it, but I can say it's beautifully animated. And whatever's being conveyed is being beautifully conveyed.

[auto-da-fey]

It's on Youtube, though, for those interested. I find it hard to explain what it's about or why I like it, but I can say it's beautifully animated. And whatever's being conveyed is being beautifully conveyed.

Brad, I'm interested in this, but confused--your link goes to a user who's only posted odd sections of the film (1/3/etc); there's someone else who seems to have the whole film, but is there a reason you posted that specific link? I might be overthinking this.

(edit: yeah, I think the multiple IMDB listings for the title got me confused, since I was thinking it should come in at nearly two hours when this is actually the 1985 film that runs 71 min. scratch this post)

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

Oh, I didn't notice that guy had only uploaded disconnected portions! I'm pretty sure that other guy you linked has the whole thing, yeah.

[auto-da-fey]

I had really wanted to post about all the gay porn films I watched in Ithaca, because I thought it would help me keep them distinct from one another in my memory, given the cognitive tsunami that watching 20 or so films in three days entails. But then I got busy and never got around to it, meaning I'll have to rely on my (fairly copious) notes in the future.

One of my favorites was Passing Strangers, from 1974; the first half is a great black-and-white San Francisco slice-of-life-with-sex that could easily fit alongside numerous 80s indie films or even Bujalski and contemporaries (the only other post-1960s b&w porn film I can even think of is Thundercrack, which doesn't really count). While the second half abruptly turns into full-color schmaltzfest, it's still a unique and memorable film that seems completely lost to time (not a single IMDB review, though Google turns up a neat [and work-safe, for real] poster with description hosted by the Kinsey Institute).*

So, having been impressed with that film, I looked into its director, Arthur Bressan, Jr. Not a very distinguished career, but in the early 80s he did move out of porn befure his AIDS-related death, and contrary to my own incorrect belief that Parting Glances was the first American AIDS film in 1986, Bressan's 1985 Buddies was about a young gay man who signs up for a "buddy" program to help otherwise abandoned AIDS patients.

This, I very much wanted to see. Unfortunately, it appears not to have ever been released for home viewing.

I have no idea what inspired me to type "Arthur Bressan" into the Netflix search--seriously, a fairly hopeless inquiry, I would think--but to my amazement, he popped up with one hit, Buddies, and it's available on instant viewing. I would assume this didn't happen effortlessly, but for the life of me, I can't imagine who at Netflix put in the effort, or why, given the quite nonexistent demand for such a film. Kudos to someone, though.

As to the film itself, it's what you'd expect for a no-budget AIDS movie from the mid-80s: stiffly made, seams showing, but still moving, angry, and occasionally surprising (some non-explicit j/o scenes, a great final shot).


* also, my favorite thing about this poster is that it's for a screening at the Vista, the Silver Lake theater at the horrible intersection where Hollywood Blvd's eastern end collapses into this 5-way honk-filled mess; I saw The Passion of the Christ there five years ago, with an audience presumably mostly unaware of the many sex acts undertaken in the same space when it was a gay porn theater in the 70s. I actually have further Vista material if I ever get around to posting gay porn reviews.

[auto-da-fey]

oh, and I still plan to watch Angel's Egg! I began it one night in Ithaca, then got called away immediately, and haven't yet managed to return to it. it's one of those "waiting for the right moment" films.

[auto-da-fey]

while avoiding work yesterday, I decided to hook my laptop up to G's TV and watch something I'd never considered before on Netflix instant viewing. I almost--and still may--watched Duck, a 2005 movie with Philip Baker Hall wandering L.A. being followed by a duck. Instead I went with My Gun is Quick, one of the most forgotten Mickey Spillane adaptations this side of Larry Cohen's 1982 I, the Jury (which, for my money, captured the spirit of Spillane perfectly, being dumb and brutal and sleazy as hell [and is also MIA on DVD, if I'm not mistaken]).

My Gun is Quick is all those things too, but in their tamer 1957 incarnations. It feels like a film out of time, the nobody co-directors having apparently missed noir entirely and instead shooting in the style of 1930s poverty-row mysteries at Republic or Monogram--all straight-ahead medium shots in threadbare interiors, basically, but then a couple of times the picture opens up for some great location shooting (a chase scene out of pre-destruction Bunker Hill onto the Harbor Freeway is straight-up awesome) before receding to its set-bound flatness. Not really much of a movie altogether; Robert Bray makes a good, belligerent Mike Hammer, we get a few striking scenes, and a climax involving a hand-replacement hook that would have rocked my world had I been 12 in 1957, but otherwise the story begins with a dead hooker and dwindles into a search for stolen jewels that just isn't as compelling.

[Andrew_TSKS]

The one I'm actually most interested in seeing, as far as Mike Hammer movies go, is "Ring Of Fear," from 1954, in which Hammer is played by Mickey Spillane. The idea of watching a writer play his character in a movie is fascinating to me.

[auto-da-fey]

Ring of Fear sounds interesting (though not good, really), and now I'm curious--Netflix has it, but not on instant viewing. Though it looks like Spillane plays himself, not Hammer (he does play Hammer in the 1963 film version of The Girl Hunters, which looks like it flickered into existence on DVD, went immediately out of print, and now fetches exorbitant sums in used markets).