Time Out review: 'Man, I was what you call ragged... I knew
I was gonna hell in a breadbasket' intones the hero in the great
opening moments of The Loveless,
and as he zips up and bikes out, it's clear that this is one of the
most original American independents in years: a bike movie which
celebrates the '50s through '80s eyes. Where earlier bike films like The
Wild Onewere forced to concentrate on plot, The Loveless deliberately
slips its story into the background in order to linger over all the
latent erotic material of the period that other films could only hint at
in their posters. Zips and sunglasses and leather form the basis of a
cool and stylish dream of sexual self-destruction, matched by a Robert Gordon
score which exaggerates the sexual aspects of '50s music. At times the
perversely slow beat of each scene can irritate, but that's a reasonable
price for the film's super-saturated atmosphere. David Thompson
This is a 35mm screening and part of the season at the ICA Cinema devoted to Werner Schroete. You can finds all the details here.
Rowe Reviews review: An experimental art film that is sure to only appeal to the more
adventurous viewer who is a fan of opaque and mysterious works of art,
Werner Schroeter’s Death of Maria Malibran provides little conclusions
through its running time but never-the-less it's a harrowing portrait
that challenges the fundamental ideals of what cinema can be. The film
is a fever dream of emotion and subtle energy, being dreamlike as it
uses a vibrant orchestral score and operatic performance art to deliver
an expressionistic art piece that confounds as much as it intrigues. The film is simply stunning, with cinematography, art direction, and
lighting which combine to create an intoxicating experience that feels
very much like an operatic stage play while still giving off an almost
supernatural vibe of mystery and intrigue. The film starts off full of
Romanticism but as it progresses it becomes clear The Death of Maria
Malibran is one of ironic romanticism and subversive style, routinely
having sound and image intentionally out of sync which creates a playful
perversion, something that becomes darker and darker as the film
progresses, dehumanizing these romanticized, picturesque woman of
bourgeois society. While trying to easily define Schroeter's film in
any easily discernible way feels like a fools errand, The Death of Maria
Maliban is a film which uses opera as a device to expose the ugliness
and cruelty that exists in bourgeouis society, one that is driven by
status and the collective ideals. Characters routinely speak in a way
that makes little sense and many of the characters become
undifferentiable as the film progresses, as if to suggest that language
itself has little meaning, as one's actions are the deriving force of
morality and personal characters. Schroeter routinely injects the film
with upbeat, vapid pop-style songs throughout, another bizarre but
expressionistic decision which speaks to the vapid nature of society.
While many of these observations could be completely off-base, The
Death of Maria Maliban as a whole feels like an indictment on the
selfish, abusive constructs which society as a whole can create, one
which routinely tears down the individual for the sake of the
collective. Conformity and lack of individuality feel like a major
aspect of this film, with the bourgeois characters essentially
attempting to destroy the young Maria Maliban for having a different
perspective than their overall ideals. Featuring so much to think
about, consider, and attempt to deconstruct, Werner Schroeter's The
Death of Maria Maliban is a film you experience more than attempt to
define, being an expressionistic fever dream that is not quite like
anything I've ever seen.
Nickel Cinema introduction: Shot on consumer-grade video and circulating for decades as a
near-mythic underground tape, Blonde Death follows the runaway odyssey
of Tammy, a teenage misfit fleeing an abusive home with two queer
outsiders who christen themselves her new family. Their improvised road
trip blends impulsive romance, petty crime, and manic self-invention,
gradually collapsing into violence as the trio drifts further from
stability. The film’s messy exuberance is threaded with a growing sense
of doom, capturing the volatility of youth pushed to the margins. A
seminal artifact of queer DIY cinema, Blonde Death fuses melodrama,
punk energy, and camp excess with unexpectedly sharp social commentary.
Director James Robert Baker — better known for his incendiary fiction —
uses the limitations of shot-on-video production to amplify the film’s
immediacy and emotional rawness. The result is a rare, transgressive
work whose jagged form reflects the precarity, rebellion, and
desperation of its characters, standing at the intersection of outsider
art and queer counterculture.
Screen Slate review: If
an angry gay anarchist reimagined Badlands for
the 80s, what might we expect of its impressionable yet fiercely
loyal protagonist? Would her family move to Orange County to start a
Christian ministry? Could her relationship with her bad-to-the-bone
boytoy be complicated by the release of his prison bunkmate? Might
the musical refrain of Carl Orff's "Gassenhauer" be
replaced by The Angry Samoans' "My Old Man's a Fatso"? And
what if the whole thing was shot on video for $2,000? These questions
are answered in Blonde
Death (1984),
which deserves a place alongside Bill Gunn's Personal
Problems as
a recently revived shot-on-video feature worthy of serious
consideration within the cinematic canon. Its director, James Robert
Baker – credited here as "James Dillinger" – is best
known for his transgressive gay fiction like Boy
Wonder (1985)
and Tim
and Pete (1993),
the latter about rekindled former lovers on a death trip to
assassinate the American New Right. Around the time of Blonde
Death's
production, Baker was an award-winning yet unproduced UCLA
screenwriting grad, and this, his only feature, was realized under
the auspices of Hollywood-based media arts center and video gallery
EZTV. The result is a tightly structured, character-driven satire
buoyed by pitch-perfect casting of unknown actors, including Sara Lee
Wade as Tammy "the teenage timebomb," who narrates in an
earnest voiceover with a singsong southern drawl. Tammy's parents
espouse strict Christian values, but her potentially closeted father
has a spanking fetish, and her stepmother, we learn, is scheming to
murder him with poison Tang to inherit money to open a new church
with her lover. When both are out of town, Tammy is aggressively
courted by a one-eyed lesbian, but she instead falls into the thralls
of a hunky home invader, with whom she plots to rob Disneyland to
start a new life. (The eventual heist is shot guerrilla style within
the Magic Kingdom.) But their plans receive a mixed blessing with the
arrival of Tammy's new squeeze's prison lover, who is embraced as a
third partner—but may be a homicidal maniac. Blonde
Death is
rich with cultural clutter: doomsday churches, singing
televangelists, pill-popping, Mickey Mouse, and knotty sexual
confusion. But Baker is uniquely talented at tying satire back to his
characters, weaving a consistently engaging tapestry of transgressive
societal commentary. And alongside the affinities with John Waters's
oeuvre, Mudhoney,
and Baby
Doll, Blonde
Death feels
equally of a piece with the Abject Art of fellow Angelenos Paul
McCarthy and Mike Kelley, or Bruce & Norman Yonemoto's
videographic deconstructions of Hollywood mythmaking and melodrama.
The result resists easy placement within the continuum of independent
80s cinema or video art; and while it seems like a tragic and unfair
twist of fate that Baker's feature filmmaking career never took
flight, such an outsider position seems to befit this perverse,
uncompromising, and deeply felt work. Jon Dieringer
Chicago Reader review: Mickey Rourke as a private investigator hired by a mysterious client
(Robert De Niro) to track down a missing person. Deliberate
mystification in all this, with imponderable flashbacks and assorted
voodoo distractions, though director Alan Parker (Midnight Express)
drops so many ironic cues along the way that when the surprise ending
finally comes, it isn’t. Parker directs everything for maximum visual
impact but can’t manage to tie the scenes together: there’s no pacing,
no development, only alternating passages of disaffected ramble and
hysterical rant. The semiautistic styling may be congenial to his
perennial themes (of personal entrapment and the self under siege), but
for all the supernatural bloodletting and explosions of technique, the
film remains distant and closed (1987). Pat Graham
Barbican introduction to this film in Iranian Masterpieces season: The final cinematic work of director Ebrahim
Golestan, this political satire places the ills of a society under a
comic magnifying glass. A Monty Python–esque allegory about the corrosive impact of oil exports on Iranian life, following a villager who discovers a hidden fortune, becomes rich overnight, and swiftly transforms into a tyrant.The film’s troubled history began even before its release. Golestan
felt compelled to conceal the story during production, aware of how his
intentions may be skewed. When it finally reached cinemas, the film was
banned after 2 weeks. The questions remained – were they
misinterpretations, or simply interpretations? Featuring several major stars of the era, including comedian Parviz Sayyad and Mary Apick.
Golestan re-edited the film but the director’s version was never
publicly screened… until now. This screening marks the world premiere of
the brand-new restoration of the film’s director’s cut.
Chicago Reader review: Having moved to London in 1967, the distinguished Iranian writer,
translator, producer, and director Ebrahim Golestan returned to his
homeland to make this unpleasant allegorical comedy (1972), his second
and final feature to date. A bitter satire about the shah’s corrupt
regime, it centers on a poor peasant who plunges into a hidden cave,
discovers a cache of valuable antiques, and becomes a grotesque nouveau
riche tyrant. Golestan tackled a related theme in his exquisite 1965
short The Iranian Crown Jewels (see listing for “Documentaries by
Ebrahim Golestan”), which was commissioned and then banned by the
shah’s cultural ministry, but that film attacked the very elitism that
subsumes this one. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: This first feature follows Mike (Favreau) as he gets back into the
dating game after the abrupt and unwelcome termination of a six-year
relationship. An out-of-work New York actor looking for a break in LA,
he's dragged out of his mope by pals Rob (Livingston), Charles (Desert),
Sue (Van Horn) and, especially, the irrepressible Trent (Vaughn), who
insists they chase down some honeys in Vegas. Wiser, and poorer, they
return to trawl the Angelino hotspots. Love it and loathe it, this film
wants it both ways. We're supposed to be appalled at the callous
chauvinism of the predatory male, but also to get off on his jive, sharp
suits and cool car. We do, too. It's a bit smug, a bit smarmy, but you
should still see this movie, and here are ten reasons why: (i) Vince Vaughn - a louche, lanky ego salesman, he's the definitive '90s lounge lizard. (ii) Jon Favreau
- a subtler actor than Vaughn, he spends the entire picture sulking,
and still has you pulling for him. Plus, he wrote the script, and (iii)
this is the most quotable movie since Clueless. (iv) It boasts
the best answerphone gag in the history of the movies. Bar none. (v-x)
Ninety minutes spent learning how not to pick up girls. This is what the
movies were made for, isn't it? Tom Charity
This presentation is part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank and also screens on February 15th. You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: One
of the first works of the Polish New Wave, Andrzej Wajda's 1958 film is
a compelling piece, although it's been somewhat overrated by critics
who considered its story of a resistance fighter's ideological struggle
as a cagey bit of anti-Soviet propaganda, and hence automatically
admirable. Following the art cinema technique of the time, Wajda tends
toward harsh and overstated imagery, but he achieves a fascinating
psychological rapport with his lead actor, Zbigniew Cybulski—who was
known as Poland's James Dean. Dave Kehr
