May 16, 2008
As this Hammer horror melodrama from 1972 opens, schoolteacher Albert Mueller (Laurence Payne) catches his wife (Domini Blythe) and one of the young village girls making their way through the countryside in what's apparently a quite unwholesome direction. He follows, but is unable to prevent their entry to the castle of Count Mitterhaus, a notoriously sexy vampire who holds the whole village under his sway. As the cuckold tries to marshal the shiftless men of the village for a rescue mission -- experience with the Count seems to have whipped everybody here into a sense of meek helplessness -- his wife offers up the young blond virgin to the vampire, who rips the girl's throat out. The woman tears her own clothes off and Mitterhaus makes love to her. When the villagers are finally coerced to make their way to the castle with torches and grim looks, they carry away the dead girl and do battle with Mitterhaus himself, who ends up impaled through the chest on a pointed wooden stick while cursing the village in a stage whisper. Albert's wife is brought outside and whipped as punishment for her betrayal, but finally runs back into the castle, which is set afire and burns into ruins. And then the opening credits roll.
Continue reading Vampire Circus (1972).
May 15, 2008
I can only hope that reports of Mike D'Angelo's death are, once again, greatly exaggerated. Even if they come from Mike D'Angelo himself.
Not movie-related, but kinda fascinating, I'd think, for content geeks of any stripe: A Usenet-based team of music obsessives -- known, apparently, as The Whitburn Project -- has been not only working on creating a huge (illegal) archive of post-1890 pop songs, but also maintaining a huge spreadsheet database of song data, including song length, BPM, label, and more. Andy Baio (Waxy.org) is running the numbers. Today, Baio charts average song duration over time, but promises more to come.
Zhang Ziyi appears in a Mercedes commercial. In China.
Check out this slideshow: Liberty City vs. New York City. What's especially interesting is, at low resolution, it's sometimes hard to tell the live-action shots from the videogame grabs.
From the Flickr comments on this image: "Last night I blew up a cab with my rocket launcher here. Bodies were everywhere."
Not movie-related, but kinda fascinating, I'd think, for content geeks of any stripe: A Usenet-based team of music obsessives -- known, apparently, as The Whitburn Project -- has been not only working on creating a huge (illegal) archive of post-1890 pop songs, but also maintaining a huge spreadsheet database of song data, including song length, BPM, label, and more. Andy Baio (Waxy.org) is running the numbers. Today, Baio charts average song duration over time, but promises more to come.
Zhang Ziyi appears in a Mercedes commercial. In China.
Check out this slideshow: Liberty City vs. New York City. What's especially interesting is, at low resolution, it's sometimes hard to tell the live-action shots from the videogame grabs.
From the Flickr comments on this image: "Last night I blew up a cab with my rocket launcher here. Bodies were everywhere."
May 12, 2008
Dawn (Jess Weixler), the protagonist of writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein's playfully gynephobic black comedy Teeth, is a high-school abstinence advocate whose no-sex-before-marriage stance masks her deep discomfort with her own body. Because Teeth is also a horror movie, the root of her fear is physical, not psychological -- as Anne Carlisle put it in the druggy downtown classic Liquid Sky, "this pussy has teeth."
Continue reading Teeth (2007).
May 11, 2008
The gimmick of this energetic Brit-com is that the action switches, approximately halfway through, from comic crime drama to comic splatter movie. The main problem, then, is that The Cottage, against the odds, makes a better caper movie than gore flick. The first half-hour or so is an engaging and amusing farce about kidnappers David (Andy Serkis) and Peter (Reece Shearsmith), who drive to a secluded house with their hostage, Tracey (Jennifer Ellison) bound and gagged in the trunk. It's not the best plan -- the outrageously busty Tracey may be the daughter of a gangster, but she's a terrible hostage, strong-willed and foul-mouthed. She knows David on sight. And their inside man, Tracey's brother Andrew, is a dimwit who brings the whole scheme tumbling down on top of them. About the time the car pulls up outside with a couple of Chinese hit men out for blood, The Cottage has established itself as a credibly tense comedy.
Continue reading The Cottage (2008).
May 8, 2008
After giving Iron Man a pass, critics generally seem to have knives out for Speed Racer, despite the fact that Speed boasts the most radical visual strategies seen in a movie theater since Sin City, and maybe longer. Yes, of course "unconventional" is not equivalent to "excellent" or even "interesting," and I guess I can understand why you might not want to let the Wachowskis play your optic nerve like a Jew's harp for more than two hours in a sitting. But, man, if you value a little razzle with your dazzle, this one delivers a lot more of that stuff than, say, Iron Man.
Continue reading Speed Racer (2008).
Image nicked from Tim Lucas's excellent Video Watchblog entry on Night of the Werewolf.
It's surely convenience, or just coincidence--rather than any nods to quality or pent-up demand--that these are the first two Euro-horror titles to arrive in high definition on Blu-ray Disc. This double-feature package from BCI and Deimos entertainment pairs two films starring the well-loved (and prolific) Spanish horror actor Paul Naschy. Vengeance of the Zombies (La Rebelion de las Muertas, 1972) is a potboiler from cult director Leon Klimovsky involving a charismatic Indian cult leader (Naschy), his less-attractive brother (also Naschy), and a beautiful redhead (Romy) from a cursed English family. And Night of the Werewolf (La Retorno del Hombre Lobo, 1980) is a genre mash-up directed by Naschy in which he stars as the wolfman Waldemar Daninsky and faces off against a bevy of vampire women led by Elizabeth Bathory herself. (Scroll way down to read about some problems with these discs.)
Continue reading Vengeance of the Zombies (1972)/Night of the Werewolf (1980) [Blu-ray].
May 5, 2008
Flight of the Red Balloon is one of
those movies where nothing much happens. It's a simple, relatively
peaceful film, notable in part because director Hou Hsao-Hsien is shooting outside Asia for the first
time. Hou's starting point--dictated by Paris's Musee d'Orsay, which commissioned the film--is La Ballon Rouge, the 1956
Albert Lamorisse film about a little boy and his companion in the streets of
Paris, a floating red balloon.
Continue reading Flight of the Red Balloon (2007).
May 2, 2008
When I read Glenn Kenny's line about Iron Man being, essentially, the best Marvel superhero movie to date, I have to admit: it pissed me off. Or, at least, Kenny pissed all over the Spider-Man fanboy inside me. But movie critics are all standing in line to carry Iron Man's jock, so what do I know?
Continue reading Iron Man (2008).
April 28, 2008
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Miramax)
Following a stroke that paralyzed him nearly completely, Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote his memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by listening to a bedside assistant read out all the letters of the alphabet and blinking each time she reached the correct one. This film is about the metaphor described in the book's title--Bauby's ruined body is like a diving bell, keeping him from interacting with the world outside, but his still-agile imagination is more like a butterfly. Director Julian Schnabel is a painter-turned-filmmaker who approaches the matter with an artist's instinct for aesthetics, and the film's first half-hour or so is a tour de force. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, known for his work with Steven Spielberg, creates a first-person experience full of both beauty and terror, imagining what the world must have looked like to Bauby in those first few days after he came out of his coma. The rest of the film, including flashbacks and fantasy sequences that amount to a contemporary take on Fellini's 8 1⁄2, is more ordinary (a tearful Max Von Sydow is excellent in what amounts to a cameo), but Mathieu Amalric gives life to Bauby's clear-eyed, life-affirming prose in an expert voiceover. (Related: Julian Schnabel in Pleasantville) Originally published in the White Plains Times.
Buy it from Amazon.com: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Continue reading DVD Traffic Report: 04/29/08.
Last Seen
Deep Focus Top Ten
Media of the Moment
The Unknown Terrorist
by Richard Flanagan (Grove Press, $24)
by Richard Flanagan (Grove Press, $24)
Richard
Flanagan's blistering diatribe on exploitation, xenophobia, and
post-9/11 paranoia is all about an Australian stripper mistaken for
a terrorist by authorities newly empowered by a down-under analog to
the Patriot Act and, more disastrously, an aging telejournalist angling
for one last, sensational scoop. Flanagan's prose can feel didactic, with over-explicit descriptions of his character's thoughts -- and sometimes this
reads more like a lecture than a thriller -- but his indignation is
ferocious and the results are occasionally chilling. I may have missed
subtleties related to Sydney's culture and/or politics, but what
resonates most is the protagonist's heartbreak at realizing not only
that the people around her are indifferent to suffering and injustice,
but that she has lived her own life at a similar emotional remove. That
distance, she learns, is a killer.
Press Clips
Deep Focus Letter Grades
About the Author
BRYANT FRAZER (email: bryant@deep-focus.com) is a journalist and film critic based in Sleepy Hollow, New York, home of the Headless Horseman. He's the editor-in-chief of Film & Video, an award-winning trade publication dedicated to filmmakers and filmmaking technology, and movie critic for the White Plains Times, an alternative newsweekly in White Plains, New York. His online movie-reviewing career began in 1985 — beat that, fellow Internet movie nerds — when he posted a (mostly positive, if memory serves) review of A Chorus Line to a local BBS (bulletin-board system) in his hometown of Pueblo, Colorado. He began reviewing on USENET newsgroups in 1994, with a single-screening missive filed from the Chicago FIlm Festival (regrettably, while he was watching Nightwatch, Chungking Express
was screening in the theater next door, which gives you some idea of
how little he really knew back in those days when he thought he knew
everything). After learning HTML to help launch Bookweb.org, one of the first book-oriented destinations online, he established Deep Focus as a Web archive for his reviews in 1995. The rest is history.
