3-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep, Swoosie Kurtz, and Jill Eikenberry star as former classmates at a reunion seven years after their graduation from Mount Holyoke College, who assess whether they have achieved their youthful goals. In a flashback, the friends – all part of a group dubbed “uncommon” because they were expected to be “amazing” before they reached thirty – relive their senior year and examine the influences that shaped them. Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s first play illustrates facing adulthood at the height of the women’s movement.
Tag: 1970s
FIGHT was based on improvisations developed by Charles Rydell and Brigid Berlin. In FIGHT the actors play a New York couple locked in a hell of relentless combat and intimacy. Conceived by Andy Warhol.
An ordinary middle class suburban couple sees a celebrity parrot on TV who supposedly foretells the future. The parrot predicts the world is coming to an end. The couple are initially shocked, and then decide to make the most of the time they have left.
In this short by the British animators Derek Lamb and Jeff Hale, a music hall performer detaches his arms, legs, ears and eventually his head for the amusement of the audience. There’s a wry humour to his performance, but also a striking sense of detail in his movements and gestures- Lamb and Hale were both veterans of the animation world by the time they collaborated on the short. Their style will likely be familiar to anyone who watched Sesame Street during the 80s or 90s- cartoons by both Lamb and Hale were in regular rotation on the show.
Arguably Larry Gottheim’s most exuberant experiment in the single-shot, single-roll format (and his first with a soundtrack), HARMONICA trains the camera on a friend improvising a tune in the backseat of a moving car. Held out the window, the harmonica becomes a musical conduit for the wind, while Gottheim’s film transforms before our eyes into a playful meditation on wrangling the natural elements into art.
Between October 11 and November 5 of 1968, teenager Norio Nagayama murdered four people in a killing spree across Japan with a shotgun stolen from a U.S. Army base. Adachi Masao, together with cultural theorist Matsuda Masao, scriptwriter Sasaki Mamoru and other collaborators, set out to trace the young man’s footsteps with a camera in hand. The result is an experimental documentary comprised purely of landscape shots, each of which shows scenery that Nagayama may or may not have seen during his upbringing and journey. Seeking an alternative to the sensationalism found in the media’s depiction of serial killers (which continues to this day), Adachi’s sparse voice-over provides only the hard facts while the increasing number of billboards in the landscapes slowly reveal the hegemony of capitalism in contemporary Japan.
This impressionist film is set in the period of “sweet peace”, at the turn of the century. Jeno Kelepei, a bohemain student, decides to move into Mutter’s brothel after a dissipated night, for food and accomodation. When the young man’s anxious mother arrives unexpectedly from the countryside, the Mutter quickly transforms the house into a boarding house for damsels.
DIFFERENT DRUMMER is a short documentary directed by Edward Gray about Jazz great Elvin Jones. In it he talks about his early days with John Coltrane (with whom he’s seen performing in a ’60s film clip) and pianist Bud Powell. He also performs drum solos and an original piece, “Three Card Molly,” with Ryo Kawasaki (guitar), Pat LaBarbera (sax) and David Williams (bass).