Janet is an overweight girl who has a knack for making the other children in school laugh… by making fun of her own weight. In seeing the other kids’ reaction, she feels that she might have a career as a comedian. She visits the local comedy club, where she finds Tony Moroni, a struggling comedian whose jokes often fail. Together, Tony helps Janet build self-esteem and she helps him with his material.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
A gang of kids find a strange house with an overgrown garden where they play. Only once do they meet the man who lives there, a dead-beat alcoholic with a free and easy spirit who welcomes them. The children see him as a romantic character in stark contrast to their neurotically house proud parents.
A wry and comic look at the shifting of power in sexual relationships, Francois Ozon’s film is adapted from a play written but never staged by the celebrated German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. When the smooth-talking Leopold , a successful businessman of 50, seduces 20-year-old Franz, the youngster falls under his spell and moves in with him. But, Leopold soon reveals his true colours and Franz contemplates returning to his girlfriend – until Leopold seduces her too. The arrival of Leopold’s former lover Vera, a male to female transsexual, only complicates matters further.
Fifth short film directed by István Szabó. It was presented at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won a Special Award. There is practically no argument, because it is nothing more than an act of love for Cecília Esztergályos, who at that time was Szabó’s girlfriend.
The solemn, intent faces of the Japanese schoolboys playing video games in Jun Ichikawa’s “No Life King” bespeak a new type of modern horror. Addicted to their favorite new game (from which the film takes its title), these children have become seriously estranged from the real world. The film’s constant emphasis is on the ways in which this has been allowed to happen, and on how emblematic it is of larger attitudes in a technological society. When a young boy trying to converse with his mother must compete with a home computer for her attention, it’s not hard to see why the boy has retreated into his own computer-dominated world.
Charlie Gordon, a mentally challenged man who is eager to learn, is given an experimental operation to increase his intelligence to genius level. The experiment seems to work, until one of the lab animals the procedure was tested on begins to lose its intelligence…
Francois Truffaut in conversation in 1977 with Richard Roud, then Director of the New York Film Festival. Truffaut, director of “Jules and Jim,” “The Four Hundred Blows, etc. was in America for the premier of “The Man Who Loved Women” at the 15th NYFF. The film director speaks of his childhood, the moral challenge of World War Two, the real meaning of the “auteur theory”, how the conservative French film industry was forced to change, Truffaut as a “culture hero” in the US, making a film that is as personal as a novel, the difference between French and American approaches to cinema, and many other themes.
America’s great film director-actor Buster Keaton, discussed by film critic Andrew Sarris and Raymond Rohauer, cinema historian, with some unusual perspectives on his goals and motivations. Illustrated with many film excerpts from 1917 to 1928. Rohauer knew Keaton and was partly responsible from rescuing many of his old films from destruction. Sarris is a leading film critic who has often written about Keaton. Excerpts include portions of “The General”, “Cops”, “Frozen North”, “The Boat”, “Sherlock, Jr.” and others. Rohauer also describes rescuing Keaton’s films from a garage and talking with Keaton at the end of his life when he had been forgotten.