In this, his 1977 feature-film debut, director Kidlat Tahimik, who is widely regarded as the father of independent Philippine cinema, stars as a Filipino jeepney driver who wants to emigrate to America to become an astronaut. Dreaming of an idealized version of the West, he chairs the fan club of the rocket designer Wernher von Braun and is a devoted listener of Voice of America. Traveling in his colorfully decorated extended jeep he arrives in Paris, where his illusions can’t survive.
Month: February 2022
Muscle Beach is a fascinating location for people-watching in the L.A. area, and in 1963, the strangeness of its sights was much more pronounced than today. Pat O’Neill’s first film (made with Robert Abel) progresses from humorous, curious observation to energetic, graphical interaction with the sights and sounds of Santa Monica’s famed beach.
Gabe Kaplan stars as David Greene, a New York deli owner who moonlights as a basketball coach at pickup games around the city. One day, David gets the offer of his dreams: a coaching position at Cadwallader College in Nevada.
A traveling minister and his wife are quietly menaced by a devil cult in the Old West. By the time the Good Reverend figures out what’s going on it may be too late to stop the evil.
Irene, a thirty-something housewife with a successful husband and a young son, has her life thrown in a spin when she becomes attracted to Billy, a member of a landscape crew outside her house. When Irene’s husband and son leave for a weekend fishing trip, Irene wanting to see Billy, gets locked in the back of his trailer and ends up at remote Lake Consequence with Billy and his girlfriend Grace where they take Irene on a trip into the nearby town to a Chinese New Year Festival, and through a series of adventures they bring out the repressed sexual needs Irene has been holding inside for a long time.
The young and handsome Kano Sozaburo is admitted to the Shinsengumi, an elite samurai group that seeks to defend the Tokugawa shogunate against reformist forces. Kano is a skilled swordsman, but his physical beauty leads the members of the strictly male group to compete for his affections, generating tensions that threaten to become lethal. In Gohatto, Nagisa Oshima explores the ambiguous forms of masculinity that the samurai code concealed, with a terrific cast including Ryuhei Matsuda, Takeshi Kitano and Tadanobu Asano subtly capturing the dangers of repressed homoerotic desire.
This Hungarian black comedy is set at a very special fantasy park that allows visitors to play organized war games. It proves to be a very popular attraction amongst the bored tourists until they suddenly realize that they are shooting real bullets. The authorities quickly close the park, but then recruits its director to begin using it to train real troops.
In Ulrike Ottinger’s contemporary reinvention of the famous morality tale, fin de siècle dandy Dorian Gray is reimagined as a drag role, played without comment on the switch by Veruschka von Lehndorff in the male lead. Ottinger’s collision of Oscar Wilde and Fritz Lang features Delphine Seyrig as one “Dr. Mabuse,” the head of a sinister multinational newspaper agency that conspires to create, control, and destroy celebrity figure Dorian Gray. The film is an odyssey through eye-popping tableaux, including a trip to an unforgettable underworld.