♦♦ Amos Vogel’s “Film as a Subversive Art“♦♦
A sensual close up study of an orange as it is peeled and eaten. Shown in Edinburgh and New York Film festivals in 1969 and first prize-winner at the 1970 First International Erotic Film Festival in San Francisco.
Margo is an ex-stripper who meets her long, lost father in Mexico. She looks after him in the waning days of his life, with the help of a traveling projectionist. The father passes away, telling of the loot from a botched bank robbery that he buried years earlier. The two get jobs in town as their relationship grows and they search for the treasure on the weekends. But while the treasure seems to bring them together, it also seems to be tearing them apart.
A very impressive transposition of William Faulkner’s story Barn Burning to rural Malaysia, this centres on an embittered worker-for-hire who uses arson as his weapon to attack those who exploit or cheat him, but doesn’t hesitate to bully his own family into submission. As the spare drama unfolds, attention focuses on the man’s youngest son, whose instinct is to rebel against his tyrannical father but who has been more influenced by him than he realises.
Jimmy Wing is a Florida journalist and long-time friend of Elmo Bliss, a local businessman and politician involved in real-estate development. Bliss reveals his ruthless side, threatening Wing when the reporter becomes close to the beautiful wildlife conservationist Kat Hubble, one of a group of ecologists that stands in the way of a new landfill. While Wing clashes with Bliss, his life gets even more complicated as his romance with Hubble progresses.
Popular idols of the rock music scene – The Rolling Stones, The Stampeders, Whiskey Howl, Alice Cooper, Muddy Waters – are seen and heard in this film. It is a penetrating look at the whole pop music sub-culture and what keeps it alive, filmed in Canada, on and off-stage, and behind the scenes at record companies, radio broadcasting studios, and board rooms where hucksters plan the sales campaigns. The film includes personal interviews in which some of the stars explain what it’s all about and features Alice Cooper hacking a doll to pieces on stage.
——UPGRADED——
A disillusioned filmmaker has an encounter with a young girl who has a ritual of repeating “Tomorrow is my birthday” everyday. He tries to communicate with her through his video camera.
Successful advertising executive Julius Armburstdiscovers his wife, Paula, is cheating on him with a hunky blond named Stefan. Believing that the best way to earn back Paula’s affection is to be more like unorthodox Stefan, Julius endeavors to transform himself into a nonconformist artist. Comic mishaps ensue when Julius, in his zeal to adopt a Bohemian lifestyle, moves in with the guileless Stefan.
