It’s a city that’s larger than life. A city without limits. A glittering mecca of excess and forbidden desires. Discover the fascinating story of this fabled destination and the people who created it. From the mobsters who made Vegas into their version of American Dream to the tycoons of today’s family mega-resorts, this is the ultimate insider’s tour of America’s neon oasis. Illuminating interviews with luminaries like Alan King, Wayne Newton and Debbie Reynolds, writer Nick Pileggi, entrepreneur Steve Wynn and Howard Hughes frontman Robert Mayheu offer a unique, unvarnished look at the fabled city, while never-before-seen footage opens a window to its tumultuous past.
Tag: 1990s
A naive Canadian barber who knows US popular culture inside and out meets a flamboyant roadie who needs someone to drive her and her “brother’s” corpse to New Orleans. Chaos ensues after the barber agrees to drive her, the corpse, and the drugs stashed within all the way.
In the first part of the film, two young women live together and create their own eccentric adventures, transforming their (always rainy) everyday environment into an enchanted playground, full of pop-musical sequences and synchronized tooth brushing performances. As the second half of the film shifts to both deeper psychological themes and a more meta-filmic playfulness, Yaguchi develops a bewitchingly melancholic atmosphere of unpredictability.
Whether in the countryside or on the edge of the city, amusement parks or fun fairs are hot across Europe. Their names, amusement parks and fun fairs, say it all: People want to be amused, they want to have fun. For example, at the Europark in southern Germany a dummy with a contorted face sits in an electric chair. Smoke comes out of him and a light flickers off and on from out of the roasted “brain” of the dummy, which shudders and cries in pain. A film on the culture of amusement in today’s “leisure” society.
Teenage siblings Nenette and Boni were raised apart as a result of their parents’ divorce. Their mother, who doted on her son Boni, has died. He works for an interesting couple as a pizza baker, and is surprised and enraged when his younger sister, having run away from boarding school, suddenly turns up. There’s a problem that they must confront.
Young lesbian parents Shareen and Claire are raising their 5-year-old daughter Honey in a converted garage on Staten Island. Shareen salvages refuse with her pickup truck while Claire waits tables at the hip Naga Saki restaurant in Manhattan, caught up in a global exchange of industrial waste via contaminated sushi. As a ghost barge bearing nuclear refuse circles the planet in search of a willing port, household pets begin to glow ominously, then disappear; and people start speaking in tongues. The crisis escalates when a multinational corporation is implicated, the couple’s daughter Honey mysteriously vanishes, and a group of young New Yorkers strike back in an unlikely alliance with activists in the developing world.
Someone Else’s Country looks critically at the radical economic changes implemented by the 1984 Labour Government — where privatisation of state assets was part of a wider agenda that sought to remake New Zealand as a model free-market state. The trickle-down ‘Rogernomics’ rhetoric warned of no gain without pain, and here the theory is counterpointed by the social effects (redundant workers, Post Office closures). Made by Alister Barry in 1996 when the effects were raw, the film draws extensively on archive footage and interviews with key “witnesses to history”.
Deceptively simple and executed with a documentary feel, this drama represents a highly personal journey home for expatriate Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman. The film is divided into two sections. The first documents the paradoxical but sleepy existence in the Arab part of Nazareth. The second part takes a more political view of the city and in it, Suleiman takes a more active role. He has come to his former home in search of inspiration, but what he sees are many disturbing images of Arab people trapped in a cultural identity crisis, a point best illustrated by the plight of a young Arab woman who wants more independence than traditionally allowed in her part of town but cannot find it because of prejudiced residents on the Jewish side.