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…
Tag: USA
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.
In this lightweight made-for-television domestic comedy, a beautiful divorcee, who got the house and the kids, finds herself allowing her husband and his ditzy young fiancee to stay with them after he gets into financial dire straits.
Bruce Conner deconstructs the repetitive imagery and messages from media coverage of the Kennedy assassination, fabricating an image track out of the fragments of the paltry documentary footage. The film is divided into two unequal parts, a longer, first section that Conner has called ‘the death of Kennedy’ and an ‘epilogue’ that imaginatively unpacks the Kennedy myth. It is also an astounding exposé of the media’s modes of creating meaning, of constructing messages, and ultimately of controlling information.
Flesh was filmmaker Paul Morrissey’s first production for Andy Warhol. The story concerns a bisexual hustler who does tricks so that he can pay for his wife’s lover’s abortion. The film made headlines when it was confiscated by the police during one of its earliest showings in 1970. Though this event is unlikely to repeat itself, Flesh is still explicit enough to elicit gasps from even the most jaded of underground-film enthusiasts.
A look at director Robert Altman’s legendary film career that spans five decades. Includes film clips and commentary from friends, coworkers and actors including Paul Newman, Jack Lemmon, Tom Skerritt, Farrah Fawcett, Elliot Gould, Keith Carradine, Lily Tomlin, Mike Figgis, Sally Kellerman, Philip Baker Hall, Fred Ward, Tim Robbins and others.
This comedy is about three generations of a Jewish family. All the action takes place around an all purpose dining table, sometimes a restaurant table and other times the dining table of a Jewish mother to end all Jewish mothers. Other characters include an exceedingly irreverent younger son, his martini swilling older brother who is married to a shiksa, and the older brother’s two kids.