Blanche Dubois goes to visit her pregnant sister and husband Stanley in New Orleans. Stanley doesn’t like her, and starts pushing her for information on some property he knows was left to the sisters. He discovers she has mortgaged the place and spent all the money, and wants to find out all he can about her. Even more friction develops between the two while they are in the apartment together…
Tag: USA
Fresh out of prison, Git rescues a former best friend (now living with Git’s girlfriend) from a beating at the hands of loan sharks. He’s now in trouble with the mob boss, Tom French, who sends Git to Cork with another debtor, Bunny Kelly, to find a guy named Frank Grogan, and take him to a man with a friendly face at a shack across a bog. It’s a tougher assignment than it seems: Git’s a novice, Bunny’s prone to rash acts, Frank doesn’t want to be found (and once he’s found, he has no money), and maybe Tom’s planning to murder Frank, which puts Git in a moral dilemma. Then, there’s the long-ago disappearance of Sonny Mulligan. What’s a decent and stand-up lad to do?
A rediscovered masterpiece, director Larry Clark’s As Above, So Below comprises a powerful political and social critique in its portrayal of Black insurgency. The film opens in 1945 with a young boy playing in his Chicago neighborhood and then follows the adult Jita-Hadi as a returning Marine with heightened political consciousness. Like The Spook Who Sat By the Door and Gordon’s War, As Above, So Below imagines a post-Watts rebellion state of siege and an organized Black underground plotting revolution. With sound excerpts from the 1968 HUAC report “Guerrilla Warfare Advocates in the United States,” As Above, So Below is one of the more politically radical films of the L.A. Rebellion.
This film is based on the famous horror story by Ambrose Bierce. It tells of a hunter whose young wife dies of fever. Her grief stricken husband prepares her body for burial, but during the night the forces of nature intervene to create a horrific and macabre ending.
A split screen shows two tightly synchronized, “impossible” shots of the same scene: a moving POV camera showing what the central character is looking at, and a stationary wide shot, both framing the entire action simultaneously. The deliberate positioning of the static, detached view above the erratic, close-up subjective POV of the central character lends an uneasy feeling to it. At the start of the film, we see the central character’s dream before he wakes up and comes out onto his balcony in the top screen (the bottom screen becomes his POV looking out the window, in sync with the top view.) Set in West Vancouver, BC.
When Max dies in an accident, he goes straight to hell. But the devil Barney makes him an offer: if he manages to get three innocent youths to sell him their souls in the next two months, he may stay on earth. Max accepts and returns to earth, equipped with special powers. However, his task is harder than expected, especially when 7-year-old Tobi demands that he marry his mother.
Hollywood legend Shirley Maclaine sings, dances and does commentary on the times in this speculative look forward at the United States’ next 200 years. Her guests are Jimmie Walker, Don Rickles, Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Jimmy Stewart, and Orson Welles.