The film tells the story of an alien from outer space who befriends two young children when he lands in a small town in Quebec.
Tag: 1970s
This cartoon version of A Christmas Carol hails from the production house of Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass–the team that brought you just about every other Christmas special you saw as a kid (including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). Reinvented as a 49-minute musical ghost story, Stingiest stars the voice of Walter Matthau as the bedeviled Scrooge and Tom Bosley as the Jiminy Cricket-type narrator, B. Humbug, Esq.
Ever-bumbling Nino is an illegal Italian immigrant working in a Swiss hotel. Waiting on the wealthy, he feels as if he’s carved out his own place in paradise. When he loses his job after being arrested for urinating in public, Nino is desperate to stay in the country. He goes into hiding, ends up living in a chicken shack and eventually decides to dye his hair blonde and pass himself off as a German. However, Nino grows to have doubts about hiding his heritage and identity.
October 1970: Under the pretext of waging war against the terrorist group Front de libération du Québec, the Canadian Parliament passes the War Measures Act. The Police and the Army use it and try to break-up popular groups in the Province of Quebec. More than 400 people are arrested for what appears to be their social activities. No charges are ever filed against them. This is their story.
A more horrific and gloomy version of The Beauty and the Beast. Julie, the youngest daughter of a bankrupt merchant, sacrifices her life in order to save her father. She goes to an enchanted castle in the woods and meets Netvor, a bird-like monster. As Netvor begins to fall in love with Julie, he must suppress his beastly urge to kill her.
Hooch is an inexpensive regional exploitation action-comedy (hicksploitation) about a small county in the Appalachians and its many moonshine-brewing inhabitants, who are all struggling to make a living. The older “brewers” are pissed off at the success of handsome young upstart Eddie Joe, who is charmingly stealing their regular customers. Meanwhile, the owner of the country store (also a moonshiner) conspires with a trio of carpetbagging Mafioso who want to take over the moonshine business in that county as an extension of their Northern business ventures.
The sponsors of a drug-rehabilitation center stage a robbery to maintain funding of the facility, but the loot turns out to be syndicate-owned.
In 1978, Ruiz was commissioned to make a television documentary about the French elections from the viewpoint of a Chilean exile in the 11th arrondissement. But, contrary to the producers’ expectation, the Left lost. Ruiz seized on this anti-climax to make a documentary about nothing except itself – a film whose central subject is forever lost in digression and ‘dispersal’, harking back to his Chilean experiments of the ’60s. It is the best, and certainly the funniest, of self-reflexive deconstructions of the documentary form. Ruiz drolly exaggerates every hare-brained convention of TV reportage, from shot/reverse shot ‘suture’ and talking-head experts to establishing shots and vox pops (narrator’s note to himself: “Include street interviews ad absurdum”.)