Archive for the ‘Marathons’ Category

  • 08 Nov

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    Weekend of Trash VI

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    After struggling to organise a weekend we were all available to get together, we finally gave in and a cosy three of us met up at Justin’s place to enjoy the 6th (recorded) Weekend of Trash (back story and previous write-ups can be found here – 1, 2, 3 & 4 & 5).

    After the last marathon’s criminal lack of VHS titles and inclusion of far too many ‘classy’ and known titles to be truly called ‘trash’, we went all out this time, with 3 tape titles and only 1 known-ish film (maybe 2, I’m not sure how well known Grand Duel is).

    I’m afraid my time’s a bit restrained at the moment so my write-ups will be a bit brief compared to usual, but I’ll still include trailers and concise thoughts on the merits (and otherwise) of each title.

    Friday Night

    Kindred

    Directors: Stephen Carpenter, Jeffrey Obrow
    Screenplay: Stephen Carpenter, Jeffrey Obrow, John Penney, Earl Ghaffari & Joseph Stefano
    Starring: Rod Steiger, Kim Hunter, David Allen Brooks
    Year: 1987
    Country: USA
    Duration: 91 min

    (2.5/5)

    Kindred is an 80′s creature feature about a scientist, John (David Allen Brooks) whose mother (also a scientist) tells him to burn all of her notes and drops a hint that he might have a brother that he wasn’t aware of. Unfortunately it begins to look as though (and the cover gives this away) John’s brother isn’t quite fully human and might not be full of ‘brotherly love’.

    It’s a very dumb film and it’s ropey script makes for a rocky first half, but it actually picks up later on and became quite a fun watch. The presence of five screenwriters was always a sign towards a clunky uneven story (why do we never go back to the evil scientist’s basement full of crazy mutants!?) but at least one of the writers knows that the film works best when it doesn’t take itself too seriously and throws in a couple of witty lines. The main draw though are the make-up effects. The practical monster and mutation effects aren’t realistic, but they’re pretty damn cool at times, especially when one woman sprouts gills!

    The Trailer:

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 08 Jun

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    Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: Badlands (1973)

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    Badlands"
    (4.5/5)

    [repost for the TIFF Lightbox Malick retrospective]

    Badlands will probably go down as the only Terrence Malick film to feature a car chase. It is a curious work in his repertoire. When it premiered in 1973, Malick’s signature style of freeform editing was still years away, the melodramatic earnestness, unconsidered. It would not be until Days of Heaven that Malick confidently broke free of the literary conventions of movie-making, all but excising the entirety of the dialogue of his screenplay, thus privileging the visual to emote what was left unsaid. While I agree with those that consider Badlands a minor work for this director, it undoubtedly remains a significant work for cinema history. More absurdist theatre than fine opera, what Badlands does provide (and something I all but erased from my memory until this last revisit) is a rare glimpse into the filmmaker’s wicked sense of humor.

    Based loosely on the Starkweather-Fugate killing spree of the 1950′s, Badlands is about two wayward youths, the James Dean lookalike, Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) and the 15-year old Dakotan tagalong, Holly (Sissy Spacek), as they pinball across the American frontier one murder to the next, with little purpose or destination. As with all of his films, the Edenic myth of a foregone paradise now overrun by the pestilence of man is hardly concealed on the surface of Badlands. The film lingers in the familiar twilight hour glow on small town America before the first crime is committed. When the title appears we see Holly in the front yard of her home like a Norman Rockwell vision abruptly intruded upon by Kit as he slinks into frame towards her like a lumbering agent of doom. He is charming and good-looking, a romantic ideal to which the film takes a certain gleeful pride in undoing as the story progresses.
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  • 21 Apr

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    Weekend of Trash V

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    We broke the rules a little for our latest movie marathon (back story and previous write-ups can be found here – 1, 2, 3 & 4), for once we didn’t watch anything on VHS (accidentally more than anything – we had a bunch on our shortlist) and there were a couple of classic and decent titles that shouldn’t really be labeled ‘trash’. Nonetheless, everything we watched was a genre film of some sort and we certainly had a lot of action, horror and exploitation on the menu. It was a mixed bag in terms of quality, era and subject matter too so read on to find out how it went.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 29 Dec

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    Weekend of Trash IV

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    TrashVHS

    I trekked over to meet up with ‘the guys’ last weekend for another one of our movie marathons (previous write-ups can be found here – 1, 2 and 3) and this session certainly didn’t disappoint. Easily our most purely exploitative lineup, this time round we watched no modern or respected cult genre offerings, we stuck solely to long forgotten titles from 70′s and 80′s, unearthing a few trashy classics along the way.

    As ever, and especially with a list of films like these, the scores relate more to the enjoyment factor rather than their quality so read on with an open mind…
    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 06 Nov

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    42nd Street Forever: Volume 1

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    42nd Street Forever 1 DVD CaseHello everyone. It’s been a while.

    Since I last posted on Row Three, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring the wild, crazy world of what’s commonly known as “Grindhouse”, or exploitation, cinema (both terms seem a bit overused nowadays, don’t they?). To this end, I purchased a series of DVDs, released by Synapse Films, titled 42nd Street Forever, which are essentially a collection of trailers from the Grindhouse era (starting in the late 60′s on through to the mid 80′s). It’s a terrific series of DVDs, and I really have a lot of fun watching them. So, as a way of kinda slipping back into things here on Row Three, I thought I’d devote some time to covering each volume of the 42nd Street Forever collection.

    Volume 1 contains over 2 hours of trailers, covering a wide range of genres and sub-genres. Needless to say, many of these trailers stretch the boundaries of good taste to their absolute limit (there’s plenty of nudity, graphic violence, and a whole lot of what we’d today term “political incorrectness” packed into these trailers). But let’s be honest: that’s what makes them so much fun!

    Now, instead of me just droning on about the various trailers in each series, I thought I’d take full advantage of all the internet has to offer by presenting a few of them, just to give you an idea of what you’d be in for if you chose to check Volume 1 out.

    That said, I guess I better start off with the following:

    Warning: the trailers presented in this post are of an adult nature, and contain violence, nudity, and sexual situations. By clicking READ MORE below, you are confirming that you are of a proper age to view this material, and are not easily offended by blah blah blah blah blah).

    Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get started:

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 02 Sep

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    Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: The Long Goodbye (1973)

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    (4.5/5)

    Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye was not on my original watch list for this marathon for a couple of reasons – I’d already seen it years ago in a college film criticism class, I already had a bunch of Altman films on the list and I wanted to diversify a little bit, and I didn’t particularly like it the first time around and wasn’t sure I wanted to revisit it, even though I suspected I would appreciate it a lot more if I did. But after I named Altman my favorite director of the marathon so far, Rot and David both recommended I give this film another look, and then it happened to be playing at a local rep cinema, and I figured it was a sign that it was time to rewatch Altman’s nearly revisionist version of Raymond Chandler’s 1940s crime novel. And I’m so glad I did.

    I wrote recently about how much I love The Big Sleep, and I think my original distaste for The Long Goodbye was merely an inability to envision any other version of Philip Marlowe than Bogart’s, or any other take on Chandler than a straight-up noir detective film. But the brilliance of The Long Goodbye is precisely in how it takes the Marlowe character and the detective story and drops it into the extremely different milieu of 1970s Los Angeles, turning it into an ironic, knowing version of the very cinema that took Chandler straight in the 1940s.

    Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe is a mumbling, ambling fellow who’s smarter than most everyone around him, but aloof enough not to bother pointing it out, except barely under his breath in a kind of on-going ironic mutter that feels more like an interior monologue than actual speech. He’s bemused at the spacey yoga-practicing girls in the apartment across the way, has little use for the police, and spends a great deal of time trying to please his cat. The cat is something of a substitute for human engagement; his general response to any human interaction is “it’s okay with me,” a detached statement of passive affability and implicit refusal to get personally involved.

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  • 19 Aug

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    Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

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    (4.5/5)

    If I had to pick one thing that ties together the films of New Hollywood, despite disparate genres and directorial styles, it would be that they tend to all start with character and then build the narrative out from there, rather than starting with plot and then writing characters into it the way a lot of films do. I’d wager a guess that this is a major reason why so many 1970s films retain their power over thirty years later. Rather than starting with the idea “let’s rob a bank,” Dog Day Afternoon begins with a character, Sonny Wortzik, who robs a bank, yes, but is much more than a guy who holds up a bank.

    Granted, this isn’t any old bank robbery, either – it quickly turned into a hostage situation with a media circus and a huge crowd outside. But it started with Sonny (Al Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale) entering a sleepy bank branch on a sweltering day, nervous and jittery. Their actions are reasonably well-planned, and Sonny’s first-hand knowledge of being a bank teller helps him out, but it’s clear these men are not seasoned bank robbers and are pretty much just as terrified as the employees about to be taken hostage. By the time they get to the vault and discover that the vast majority of the cash has been picked up for transit to the bank’s headquarters, the police are already on the scene and there’s little Sonny can do but hold everyone as hostages and think of a way out.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 30 Jul

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    Weekend of Trash III

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    TrashVHS

    With my wife-to-be over in her home country of Finland for a week I took it upon myself to get the boys round for another one of our regular ‘trashathons’ last weekend (check out my previous write ups here and here). For the uninitiated (or those who can’t be bothered to look up those two links) these weekends involve pulling out our lowest budgeted, most breast, explosion and blood filled crappy VHS and bargain-basement DVD’s we can find and subjecting ourselves to their ‘pleasures’ for two nights and a morning. We usually squeeze in a couple of classier modern genre films too that haven’t received the widest of releases.

    This weekend really delivered the goods I must say. There were no straight up classics, but pretty much all of them did exactly what they said on the tin, which is more than can be said for a lot of exploitation flicks – most make better trailers than they do films.

    As usual don’t take the star ratings too seriously – I’m generally going on entertainment value over quality.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 22 Jul

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    Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: Targets (1968)

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    (4/5)

    Slight spoilers for the end of the film.

    This isn’t on the “official” film list I put together for the Easy Riders Raging Bulls marathon, but I watched it on a whim the other day and was quite taken with it, so decided to slip in a post about it anyway. Targets is the first feature from director Peter Bogdanovich, likely the most obviously cinephiliac New Hollywood filmmaker, and though his love of and dependence on cinema history is evident in just about all of his films, nowhere is it more pronounced than here.

    Boris Karloff, in one of his final film roles, plays aging horror actor Byron Orlock, a cultured Brit typecast in monster movie roles just like Karloff himself was for just about his whole career. Orlock decides out of the blue to retire, much to the consternation of up-and-coming writer/director Sammy Michaels (played by Bogdanovich), who has just written a serious role specifically for him that Michaels believes would be worthy of his talents. The fact that Michaels is dating Orlock’s assistant (who would presumably return to England with him upon his retirement) is also a factor. Meanwhile, a parallel plot thread follows Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), a clean-cut young man who seems perfectly normal except perhaps a slight obsession with guns and an indefinable sense of ennui about his home life with his wife and parents – until he calmly takes a sniper rifle up on a water tower and starts picking off targets at random on the freeway.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 19 Jul

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    Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: Nashville (1975)

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    (5/5)

    So far, Robert Altman is winning the award for my favorite filmmaker of this marathon – I almost want to say favorite discovery, which sounds weird when talking about someone of Altman’s reputation and stature, but it is true that I hadn’t seen any of his pre-90s films until now. And of all the films so far in this marathon that I hadn’t seen before, Altman’s have been consistently my favorites – Nashville only confirms and expands that.

    Nashville is one of Altman’s most renowned films, and often cited for its use of a vast interlocking ensemble cast (something of an Altman trademark), yet even with that reputation in my head when I sat down to watch it, Nashville still managed to exceed my expectations. The setting is the lead-up to a political rally for the fictitious Replacement Party in Nashville, the country music capital of the world. Meanwhile, various musicians and singers weave in and out of recording studios, live shows, traffic jams, parties, personal breakdowns, career disappointments, and affairs.

    The balance that Altman and screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury find among all the different characters, giving each enough time and back story to make us feel we know them, yet never letting any single character become more central than any other, is nothing short of astounding. By using an extremely simple overall plot (three days of vignettes loosely tied together by the recurring political campaigning, though even that isn’t as central as I expected it to be) and letting the story flow from the characters, Nashville manages to avoid the pitfalls that many ensemble films fall into – especially that of an overly complicated plot preventing us from feeling connected to the multitude of characters.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 23 Jun

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    Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: The Godfather, Part II (1974)

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    (4.5/5)

    My history with the Godfather trilogy isn’t that of your typical movie buff…and by that I mean I’m not a ginormous fan of The Godfather. The first time I saw it several years ago I really wasn’t a fan – I disliked Marlon Brando’s mumbling, I thought it was overlong with not much interesting happening, I didn’t like how it ended, I just…didn’t get it. I rewatched it a few months ago and appreciated it a lot more – I like the ending now, for example, and I can handle the pacing better, though I’m still not really a big fan of Brando (not just in this film, I’m not a Brando fan in general), and I still don’t particularly care for the way the Italy-set section plays out. But I can definitely understand now why people do like it, and I’m prepared to give it props for the many, many things it does beautifully. Anyway, from what I’d heard I was hoping to like The Godfather Part II a bit better. And I did, quite a bit better.

    While The Godfather focuses on the changing of the guard from Vito Corleone to his son Michael and how Michael deals with becoming the leader of a family business he’d once hoped to escape, The Godfather Part II has a two-pronged story – alternating segments tell the story of Vito Corleone’s emigration to America as a boy and how he became a Mafia boss, and the continuing story of Michael as he tries to manage the family in the years after his father’s death. Perhaps predictably, given my ambivalent feelings towards the first film, I still found myself a little uninterested in Michael’s problems, but every single scene in the Vito story had me totally rapt.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 03 May

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    Another Weekend of Trash

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    My friends and I recently got together for another one of our regular ‘trashathons’ – you may remember I covered the last extravaganza in one of my first posts here at Row Three. Basically consisting of watching as many cheap and cheesy genre titles we can handle in a weekend, our get-togethers have become a quarterly staple that I always look forward to. We’ve watched some really bad films, but we’ve also dug out some real gems in the past, many of which have disappeared completely with the DVD boom. Yes, I’m talking VHS here. Throwing picture quality out the window we’ve been scouring the bins for some long forgotten titles. This time round we didn’t manage to squeeze in quite as many films (we spent hours at a car boot sale purchasing more!) and a few aren’t obscure by any means (only two titles were on VHS this time), but I still enjoyed myself and thought you guys might like to hear what we got up to. Again I’ve dug out some trailers and clips for your amusement.

    P.S. Ratings are probably not worth it for most of these titles, but I’m going to give some scores for shear entertainment value, so don’t take them too seriously.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

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