Not on DVD

[Andrew_TSKS]

Oh, hmm, I guess I have the two confused. Weird.

[clare]

Fucking YESSSS!!!!!  https://www.jbhifionline.com.au/dvd/dvd-genres/drama-romance/dogs-in-space-limited-2-dvd-tin-set/437280 finally released on DVD!!!

[auto-da-fey]

Philly has been a cinematic utopia this week. Latest case in point: this month's round of Andrew's Video Vault, a free triple-feature of Island of Lost Souls, the 1996 Island of Dr. Moreau, and Monstrosity, one of Andy Milligan's final films from the late 80s.

I didn't want to watch the first two, so I showed up at 10:45, but Val Kilmer was still onscreen. Went outside to read until I heard credits-music, then this young woman in a leather jacket came out early to smoke. We began talking, I told her about Andy Milligan, she said she wasn't staying for his flick, then she pulled out this peanut-butter jar full of rum and asked if I wanted a swig. Swig-pass it back-swig again-repeat; we demolish the jar; she's telling me how she's taking physics classes at the community college in the hopes of seeing reality differently, I begin to feel my lips and then face go numb and hear myself telling her about The Tao of Physics and the Dancing Wu-Li Masters--hey, fuck off, when else does having read these ever pay off?--and part of me is beginning to wonder if this is headed for a makeout session; then suddenly I'm all "holy shit, I think Moreau is over, oh no!" and face a crisis; decide my commitment to Andy Milligan outweighs my commitment to random social encounters; and stumble in.

Mildly inebriated and five minutes late is the perfect way to watch Monstrosity, and the 8th-generation-VHS-dupe picture quality even more so. Thing is flat-out wretched, a zero-budget rape-revenge movie where some West Hollywood prettyboys build a Golem to kill the punks who killed one of their (very unlikely) girlfriends. Unlike his 60/70s stuff, Milligan overtly plays it for camp, but what initially feels like Troma-but-worse increasingly feels like an act of aggression against his audience. The final scene expresses serious contempt: a stupid discussion on a bus bench, a camera tilt up to the sky, a cry of "cut! that's a wrap!" . . . then a solid three or four minutes of the static camera facing the bench from across the street while the actors celebrate, pick up, walk offscreen, and then . . . nothing, just the shot held while the audience squirms. That was kind of interesting, but otherwise, I'd take 1980s Ray Dennis Steckler over 80s Milligan in a heartbeat.

[Snarfyguy]

You certainly are a dedicated movie-goer!

By which I mean I might have pursued the girl instead.

[Andrew_TSKS]

I'm thinking I woulda made a real effort to talk her into coming back into the theater and watching the Milligan flick with me.

[auto-da-fey]

The brilliant "Los Angeles Plays Itself" may or may not ever make it to DVD. Such is.

Even more than Los Angeles Plays Itself, I'd love to see some of the films included in it make it to DVD--not least L.A. Plays Itself, which is my nomination for the best gay porn feature ever, even though I still have yet to see that damn fisting scene excised from the only VHS copy I've managed to track down. Which I know I've mentioned before, but which irks me still. Not because I'm hankering for fisting footage, but because edited films make me irate.

Bless Their Little Hearts and The Exiles also stick out in my memory as two films Andersen uses that I'd ove to see show up on DVD.

So I think my favorite DVD event of the year is that The Exiles finally showed up on DVD last week. I bought it, being incredibly excited about the lavish 2-disc set (I often hate pointless DVD extras, but the ones here are carefully chosen and relevant--Milestone really trumps most Criterion discs with this release) and wanting to support this kind of effort. So glad that I did: the film, shot in the late 50s and barely released in 1961, is a near-masterpiece, significant on so many levels: paralleling and anticipating early Cassavetes in style and approach, highlighting the otherwise unrecorded lives of the Native American urban diaspora of the 1950s, and capturing downtown Los Angeles' Bunker Hill neighborhood in vivid detail shortly before the entire community was razed in the name of redevelopment. Filmmaker Kent Mackenzie depicts some rough sexism without editorial comment, but he also foregrounds an Indian woman's subjectivity with the lead voiceover narration (it shifts characters as it goes), and he captures a lost L.A. that not even film noir really penetrated. The restoration is astonishing in its clarity, and . . . well, I'm too lazy to give it the measured, multi-paragraph post it deserves, but this thing just brings great joy to my heart and I encourage everyone to see it (well, everyone who's interested in low-budget independent cinema--don't expect pumping narrative momentum or anything, it's very much social-realist filmmaking).

I can't wait to dig into the remaining extras--several short films on Bunker Hill, a commentary track with Sherman Alexie, even more (I did play the audio track of its first public screening at UCLA a few years back--I'm pretty sure one of my friends [who has seen Los Angeles Plays Itself {a clip of which is included here, hence the Nickosaurus quote} a mindboggling FIVE TIMES, thus making her one of the coolest people on earth in my humble opinion] was there, and I'm jealous--when the new print toured, I missed it twice in L.A. and twice in Philly, making this DVD all the more satisfying).

[auto-da-fey]

While I'm at it, I squatted in an empty classroom and projected Chantal Akerman's Hotel Monterey for myself a while back. Thing is somewhat rough going; even further back, I saw her 1977 News From Home, which is 90 minutes of lengthy static shots of NYC with voiceover letters from her mother, and while I found that compelling (being a sucker for urban scenery), Hotel Monterey takes a more extremist approach: mostly interior shots of a retirement hotel, with no sound whatsoever. It's a challenge; there's a shot of an elevator opening, closing, making a trip, and returning that felt about ten minutes long. But as with Jeanne Dielman, the accumulated boredom does have its payoffs: when Akerman does a tracking shot down an empty hallway, the camera movement feels absolutely cathartic. Then she repeats it five times. Near the end, the visuals open up a bit by looking out from the rooftop, and again, there's a mildly exhilarating sense of freedom from the built-up claustrophobia. I'd be fronting were I to heap accolades on this one, but I do appreciate it as a rigorous cinematic essay on a particular drab spatial mood. I think it might be part of the Criterion set of Akerman in the 70s coming out in January, and if so, I give them credit for not flinching in the face of her driest work.

[coldforge]

adf, I cannot begin to understand how you can sit through more than 5 minutes of that kind of thing.

[davy]

Hell, I couldn't even finish Koyaanisqatsi.

[Ah_Pook]

cold dog soup isnt on dvd

i only saw it once, late late at night on a lot of drugs on some random cable station. this was years ago. it probably isnt actually very good, but its built up a mythic status in my mind anyway. i wouldnt mind watching it again. it was definitely a fucking weird movie, even if youre sober.

[auto-da-fey]

Earlier this month I got word that yet another video rental joint was liquidating its stock, this time the Video Library in West Philly. Sad as hell to see these these places go, but of course always a vulturelike thrill in picking clean their bones. I can't believe I didn't post about this at the time, it was probably one my highlights of the year.

Went in, found a dispiritingly bland remaining stock, settled on the recent Lady Chatterley and one of those shitty horror remakes (Black Christmas or Last House, I can't recall which) just to buy something for my effort in venturing out there.

Then, walking up to the counter, saw a small, handwritten sign taped to a shelf at knee-level: "VHS $1." Oh? But I didn't see any; figured I must have missed the bonanza. Shrugged, then asked the clerk anyway. He didn't inspire much enthusiasm; "Yeah, we've got some, but they mostly lack cases. They're in the back, you can see them if you want to." On the why-not principle, I followed him back--through a backroom, which led into a disorderly office room, and finally in turn to this cavernous, underlit storage room, filled with two huge walls of VHS tapes in black cases. "Dig around, if you want," he said, and left me there.

It was obnoxious to have to open each case to see what was inside, and early titles weren't promising--lots of mid-90s drama and horror, nothing too noteworthy. Then I hit a porn tape. That motivated some further exploring; next came a lengthy string of old Something Weird tapes, several of which they never bothered to put out on DVD. So I kept digging, excitedly setting aside the stuff that interested me. Eventually a pile was amassed: 32 tapes altogether. It broke down into three categories: porn (much of which I couldn't even tell whether it was straight or gay--a title like "The Tower" could go either way, but you know it's porn even when the title is such because of the assurances that the performers are over 18 on the tape's sticker, something Vestron or New Line never bothered with); sizeable stack of Something Weird obscurities (most promising title: The Filth Shop); and some actual quality cinema that's still absent on R1 DVD (Abel Ferrara's The Addiction; Joseph Losey's The Go-Between; the 1972 Maya Angelou-written Georgia, Georgia, about which I'm really excited; the released but OOP Dementia/Daughter of Horror from Kino; etc). It took a while; for every treasure there were a dozen Merchant-Ivories or Lorenzo Lamasses, but man, I was like a kid in an abandoned candyshop, left to my own devices back there. It was awesome, though I did feel dopily self-conscious lugging home two large bags of VHS tapes on the subway.

I called a few days later to see if the place was still open, thinking I might go back for some of the second-tier Something Weird movies, but turns out someone came along and bought the whole VHS collection for $200. A slight bummer, but I was also like, sucka, I extracted the finest gems first.

[auto-da-fey]

Oh, I got so carried away with that, I forgot what caused me to post it: I just watched the 1976 Swedish police-procedural thriller The Man on the Roof, another score from the Video Library. Its cultish reputation exceeds its actual merit a bit, but it's still a tight, no-frills, no-nonsense piece of work, like if Don Siegel remade The French Connection in Stockholm. The director, Bo Widerberg, also made Elvira Madigan, which I've never felt inspired to see, but this is definitely far removed from it, a gritty, morally ambiguous bit of stripped-down pulp. 1 for 1 so far, 31 to go.

[auto-da-fey]

A few movies for this thread, seen on two coasts in the past month or so:

Ruins is this 1999 fake-documentary about archaeology and cultural imperialism in Mexico. It was randomly screening at an academic history conference in San Diego, and while it did indeed invoke several scholarly discourses, it did so in a disappointingly heavy-handed way. It reminded me a lot of Marlon Fuentes' amazing and tragically unseen Bontoc Eulogy, minus the part where that film was effective cinematically and not just as a treatise. Turns out the guy who made Ruins is not only an academic, but also the co-editor of the book F is for Phony and co-organizer of the fake-documentary series where I saw Bontoc Eulogy; he's got great taste, but it just doesn't translate to great filmmaking. 

Then Elaine May's A New Leaf at the New Beverly in Los Angeles. I've been wanting to see this since finally catching Mikey & Nicky a while back, but it was slightly disappointing--I guess I wanted a 1971 Walter Matthau movie to be more in line with his grittier 70s work like Charley Varrick and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, but this is closer to his Neil Simon movies (which, yes, is what one should expect, I just didn't want to). Oh well, a desire satisfied nonetheless, and I do like Elaine May a lot as an actress. It played with Monsieur Verdoux, which was much stronger in my memory than it was onscreen in 2010.

Finally, Buster and Billie back in Philly. All I'd ever known about this was that it's a romance movie where Jan-Michael Vincent shows his junk, but it was better than anticipated, in that the characters come off more fully-rounded than you'd have any reason to expect, and the emotions in the film are messier than your usual strict love-story arc. Vincent is actually great--dude's cinematic moment was brief, but with the run of this, The Mechanic, and White Line Fever, he burned brightly before he burned out. It's always weird to see Robert Englund in anything pre-Freddie, but he's good here too as the gangly friend. The really strange thing is that the film takes an abrupt swerve into graphic, unnerving violence near the end. I'm not sure it works, but I give it credit for following its convictions; ain't no weeping Ryan O'Neal here, just some bloodstains and a folky theme song that Gordon Lightfoot would have sold his soul to have written.

[auto-da-fey]

oh, but the real reason I revived this thread was that it seemed the most fitting place to unveil my VHS-tribute short. okay, the motion is jerky and the image blurry at times, and upon watching myself walk it appears that I quite literally embody the phrase "limp-wristed," but pfft to all of that, this is precisely what I had wanted to do when I first bought a Flip; kind of a shame I hit my peak so immediately and that it'll all be downhill from here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEK3dxZZki4

[andronicus]

That video is the best thing that's ever happened to me.

[andronicus]

I'm stalking you, Whit.

Starting tomorrow.

[auto-da-fey]

Not on DVD question:
Abel Gance's 1927 silent Napoleon is screening tomorrow, for free and with live accompaniment, in West Philly (unless it's canceled, which is quite likely); it's the 235-minute version. I am aware of contentious battles over the proper cut of this film but less aware of whether those battles ever reached a consensus. I've never seen the film and figure it's not something I'll see twice, so, the question is: do I attend this, or hold out for the more recent, longer cut to surface somewhere?

phrased differently, am I doing the film an injustice to see it in this incarnation?

[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.

[auto-da-fey]

Oh well damn, I missed Promised Lands, Susan Sontag's documentary about the Yom Kippur War, tonight. I'd really been looking forward to it, I just got busy and forgot (also missed Melvin Van Peebles speaking, but I'd have taken Sontag--films over filmmakers, in my book).

In missing it, though, I do see that the I-House has a Joyce Wieland retrospective coming up. I don't know much about her, but I find that image from The Far Shore (if you scroll 2/3 down) really captivating, and I think I'd like to attend some of these screenings. Any Canadian film buffs who can speak to Wieland's highlights?

[auto-da-fey]

LPTJCanada, you failed to advise me on Joyce Wieland. So I went tonight, knowing nothing of what to expect, and found some rather challenging cinematic terrain.

The first two shorts were charming enough--Patriotism 1 and 2, from the mid-1960s. In the first one, a bunch of hotdogs sally forth across the bed of a sleeping man until an American flag gobbles them all up. Playful, enjoyable avant-garde frivolity, these.

Then came Pierre Vallieres, about the Quebecois radical separatist. It is a half-hour of him speaking, shot in extreme close-up that never wavers from his lips. I guess how one responds to this depends on how one feels about submitting to formalist experimentation where you get the idea quickly and then have no choice but to ride it out for the filmmaker's chosen duration (though actually, in terms of verbal content, Vallieres does have some interesting things to say and sounds more thoughtful than your average Weatherman of the era). I like the way Wieland's film complements the then-emerging French feminist critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis--like Cixous and Irigaray, she inverts the "language is phallic" framework by reducing Vallieres to the labial; I have no idea whether this was her intent or I was just bored enough to sit there trying to project meaning into the film by aligning it with a theoretical movement, but this is 2010, repping for authorial intent, etc.

Finally, La Raison Avant La Passion, at 80 minutes, was interesting but also rather trying. It began with five minutes of flickering Brakhagian flux so abrasive my eyes were getting sore, but then it settles down into a series of brief, choppy shots of the Canadian countryside, with no sound but a recurring blip and scrambled versions of "reason over passion" superimposed over the screen at four-second intervals. That's it, basically, except a brief time-out for red and white blocks of color, and a weird montage of sinister-looking shots of Pierre Trudeau set to painful industrial white noise. The title comes from a comment Trudeau made, endorsing reason over passion as the Canadian way, and Wieland seems to have strong feelings on the matter.

Anyway, I will not be starting up the Joyce Wieland fan club (it would be small locally--total crowd for the screening was about eight, in a nice-sized theater at Penn), but I'll probably return on Friday for her one narrative feature film, since I do appreciate the effort that goes into recovering lost cinematic moments like these. 

[auto-da-fey]

also hannah, if you read this, do you know Wieland? I believe one of your memory-bytin' profs has written on her, ages ago.

[Ashley]

Aren't there only two LPTJCanadians?

I've been wondering this for a few days so I'm interested in an actual answer.

I mean, its been freaking me out a lot.

[davy]

I know of at least three off the top of my head. You, ella, and cbs.

[auto-da-fey]

oh man, I forgot cbs. come on you three, where's your national cinematic pride? it can't be all guy maddin, all the time.

[Ashley]

The extent of my knowledge of canadian cinema is canadian movies that are on teevee and the eerie feeling you get that makes you know they're canadian despite them not saying anything about being canadian or referencing canada at all.

it has something to do with them being quiet and having some awkward sexuality i think.

also i know a lot of weird newfoundland movies that i can't find online.  like the divine ryans.

where is cbs from / live?  Because I know about ella and it freaks me out because I live like down the street from him and likely walk past his living quarters every day.  I was like "man of all the thousands of lptj posters the only two canadians and neighbours.  and canada is huge!"