8MM (1999) and The Conversation (1974)

Two films have been on my mind a lot lately: 8mm (1999), directed by Joel Schumacher, and The Conversation (1974), directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Both deal with a male who gets too cozy with his work and loses his marbles as a result. 8mm is more conventional as a film, but its story is more perverse and twisted. Nick Cage is best when he portrays mind-losers, and he really drives this one home for the victory lap: he plays a nervous, workaholic private eye hired by a very wealthy family who discover, after their daddy dies, there's an 8mm snuff film their safe. Dead daddy's confused, aging widow charges Cage's character with finding how the film got in the safe and to seek the identity of the girl killed in it by a leather-masked gimp. Already smoking cigarettes behind his wife's back (played by Catherine Keener) and on a long absence from her and the baby, Cage's private eye goes deeper into the mystery, milling about in L.A.'s EXXXtreme porno underworld. There, he gets help in finding the director of the snuff film from a young smut pusher cum-musician named Max California (played by Joaquin Phoenix). Upon the private eye's full immersion in the pervert void his determination to bring justice for an otherwise forgotten young girl has calcified into lunacy. He tricks the evil pornographer into outing himself to catastrophic effect for both, and by Cage's character identifying too much with the dead girl's fate, he ends up dredging up as much dirt within himself as he does for the family that hired him. 8mm's power is primarily driven by the spiraling narrative and its curated menagerie of sleazy characters, but there's an added benefit, which was no doubt added by the 10 years since its release: with everything going digital nowadays, obsolete analog technology—in this case the grainy physicality of the 8mm 'snuff film' —has rarely made violence more primal and creepy.
Another post on the more brilliant of the two, The Conversation, next time.....

White Dog (1982)

Sam Fuller's last film before his self-imposed exile to France for the bulk of his later years. It was denied release in the U.S. due to the studio's fear of boycotts and political backlash due to the film's subject matter, which entailed a white German Shepherd, trained to kill black people, historically referred to as a 'white dog'. It was too bad the knee jerk reaction to the film's 'star' character, blotted out the the film's anti-racist message, which begged the question of whether a 'racist' animal could be retrained, by a black man, to be a peaceful and non-discriminatory pooch.

Heavy-handed, awkward, and heavily redolent of after-school special fare, horror, and melodrama, the film strangely succeeds by dint of the powerful subject matter, Paul Winfield's performance as the black animal trainer, Ennio Morricone's amazing and touching score, and its intense, if depressing conclusion.

It's streaming on netflix now. Please see it! Criterion only released it a year or two ago.

God Respects Us When We Work, But Loves Us When We Dance (1968)

I saw this last night in the theater. A series of excerpts from the Les Blank film.

House (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)

I posted the trailer for this film before and have luckily found a link to watching it online!
I plan on buying it on DVD when Criterion puts it out later this year, replete with new subtitles, replacing the old nonsensical ones of past versions. I don't usually plan on this when I haven't even seen the film yet.

I did some research on this and found that Mr. Obayashi, previous to making this film— and after making it— was a prominent and prolific commercial director in Japan.

Apparently silly, scary, beautiful and kitschy all at time same time, this film reeks of awesomeness.

If you watch it online, tell me what you think. I plan on watching it tonight with a box of ginger snaps.

Regarding WITHNAIL AND I

It's official, Withnail and I (1989) is one of my all-time favorite films.

A comedy with 'no discernible jokes'. Starring Paul McGann and Richard E. Grant

Cat People (1982)

Wow, what a finale to this year. No money—no wait, like, negative money—a car accident, an absentee girlfriend, and no job prospects. What better time to watch Paul Schraeder's Cat People, starring John Heard, Malcolm McDowell, and Nastassja Kinski? AND to receive the bonus gift of a soundtrack by Georgio Moroder and David Bowie?

Mr. Schrader is best known as the writer of Taxi Driver (1975), and Raging Bull (1980). He's also a crafty academic of cinema, writing a book on Bresson and Dreyer. Cat People is not a great movie by any means, but a fine stylistic example of 80s cinema. One of the few 'arty' horror films that I will remember watching, though. It's mainly about a 'family' of half people/half cats which started in ancient times when a leopard seeded a young cave maiden. Kinski looks hot as fark in this as a demure cat-temptress hounded by her horny cat-brother, with John Heard's character, a zoologist, caught in the middle. It was fun to watch and found that the week after, while at a friend's house, that the cat of the house nuzzled next to me immediately. My friend told me that that cat rarely does that for anyone. Is it because I watched Cat People? Maybe. But it's mostly because I probably smelled like a homeless person.

Another Body Double post...

'....but I rerented Body Double because I want to watch it again tonight even though I know I won't have enough time to masturbate over the scene where the woman is getting drilled to death by a power drill since I have a date with Courtney at seven-thirty at Café Luxembourg.'

-Patrick Bateman, American Psycho

Rob Reiner: Drummer/Painter

Rob Reiner's cool paintings from Anvil: The Story of Anvil

If it doesn't work out for Mr. Reiner in Anvil, I hope he keeps painting.

Watch this 100 x and call me in the afterlife

The Long Goodbye by Bob Altman

I DON'T Love you, (ASS) Man

I tried watching I Love You, Man (2009). Even on a peripheral level of attention in the studio today, this movie made me ornery. You might say, "Why?". This is because I needed something dumb on to distract me from my inner-angst, and it still failed at its purpose. This Paul Rudd, Judd Apatow-branded, mediocre-fest failed me and humanity. There has to be a word out there for work that is so mediocre it makes you want to take stab a screwdriver into my pillow. No, face.
How about "over-ocred"? Well, let me know if you think of something better.

I've decided that this Apatow brand is consistently sexist on a weird level towards it female characters and relies on the same kind of gags to distract its audience from its safe, conservative constraints. Namely, gags that involve vomiting, explicit sex jokes, and farts. They're playing for the middle, but the middle sucks. So hard.

R.I.P. John Hughes

As I was making dinner last night, a great scene from Some Kind of Wonderful(1987) popped into my head. It was the scene when Eric Stoltz's character, Keith, crashes the house of the rich snotnose with whom he was competing for the affections of Amanda Jones, played by Leigh Thompson. Just when Keith was about to get his ass whupped, he gets saved by his friends from detention, a bunch of 'punks', who had earlier in the film, been his enemies. They scare the snotnose into submission in front of the whole school, humiliating him. It was a beautiful moment which I wished had replicated itself many times in my youth, when I was made to feel 'lesser' than a person or group. As I toasted my bread, I relished the looks on my opponents faces if I had a bunch of punks to 'have my back'.

The de facto leader of this bunch, Duncan, played by Elias Koteas, bonded with Keith over their mutually appreciated drawing skills (another great moment in the film), enabling their alliance. Koteas played one of the most memorable punk slackers in teen movie history, a perfect comedic compliment to the earnestness of Keith and Amanda.

Who's responsible for these awesome characters existing, not to mention many others, including Ferris Bueller? John Hughes. I hope I didn't kill him last night because I do find it odd that he should die the day after I remember that scene. But then again, maybe he had always permeated my mind. I almost brought Ferris Bueller's Day Off to show my young students in art class last week. Even though John Hughes left filmmaking over 15 years ago, his presence is still in my mind, way more often than I thought.

"We're gonna bring this party up to a nice respectable level. Don't worry, we're not gonna hurt anyone. We're not even gonna touch 'em. We're just gonna make 'em cry a little, just by lookin' at 'em." ——Duncan

Miracle Mile (1989)

I've known about this film since the mid-90s, when it would play fairly often on cable. I've always loved it. It is the scariest movie about nuclear war ever made. While it was low-budget and faulty in many ways, the suspense in the film is very effective because you are not sure until the end of the film if what the protaganist (played by Revenge of the Nerd Anthony Edwards) is seeing is actually a dream or not.

The film, centered on the neigborhood bearing the movie's name, starts with the main character picking up a ringing public phone in front of Johnnie's Cafe at Fairfax and Wilshire. He hears someone frantically warning on the other end of the line that a nuclear wad is heading for Los Angeles. Even while not being sure if the call was hoax or not, what happens next is the character's struggle to get out of the city without leaving behind his not very good-looking love-at-first-sight girlfriend, played by Mare Winningham. The chaos that ensues in Los Angeles when the word gets out is nothing short of delicious and riveting. Stick around the for the shocking ending.

It's streaming on Netflix if you wanna see for yourself....