Overlooked Films

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Postby IanEye » Tue Feb 26, 2008 1:47 pm

another 'murdered' film:
Mike's Murder

Writer/director James Bridges originally wrote and edited the film so that the story played chronologically backward, similar to what Memento and Irreversible did 16 years later. However, the studio got nervous, thinking it was too complicated and hard to follow, and had the film re-edited in chronological order for release.

This was the first project Debra Winger did after An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). After a poor reception from preview audiences, the ad campaign was changed, the soundtrack music was replaced and the film was re-edited. It was eventually released in 1984 after Winger had a hit with Terms of Endearment (1983).


there are some who say this film got a little 'too close' to the stark reality of Hollywood in the early '80s.

After a protracted postproduction period, Mike's Murder proves an intriguing, if not entirely successful, suspenser and paranoid mood piece. Resolutely a small, serious film, pic was made quickly and cheaply by James Bridges during the summer of 1982. Reported negative reactions at sneaks in northern California prompted drastic recutting. In addition, a score written by pop musician Joe Jackson was all but discarded.
Mark Keyloun's Mike is a casual, off-and-on-again lover of Debra Winger. He's a tennis teacher who earns additional dough as a small time drug dealer. Unfortunately, with his sideline activities come some unsavory characters, notably the uncouth, impulsive Peter, convincingly played by Darrell Larson. In short order, Keyloun is killed and Larson is informed by a former associate that he's 'a dead man.'

A modestly successful bank employee, Winger spurns friends' advice and begins investigating the realities of Mike's world, meeting some of his lawless friends and ultimately being threatened by the desperate Larson.

With its consciously repetitive scenes of driving around Los Angeles streets, film attempts a contemplative approach to the material and mood of impending doom. The attempt is both interesting and admirable - up to a point. As usual, Winger is wonderful to watch at all times, but her character is something of a cipher, and lack of any psychological angle holds down the film's ultimate achievement.
link: http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117793118.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&p=0
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Postby judasdisney » Wed Feb 27, 2008 7:57 am

Jeff wrote:Cutter's Way


I have been holding my silence about this one because I've been an overzealous proselytizer about Cutter's Way.

Siskel & Ebert introduced me to Cutter's Way in 1982 when they included it on their PBS show "Sneak Previews" as one of the great overlooked films.

Cutter's Way is in my Top 10 films of all time.

Cutter's Way is my secret touchstone, a hidden chapter in history, a modern Hamlet, a film noir with ironic loud sunlight.

Cutter's Way is not for everybody.

When I saw "The Big Lebowski," I knew that Jeff Bridges was ripping-off Richard Bone, his own character in Cutter's Way, as a comic turn.

When I dream of writing a masterpiece screenplay, I aspire to the scope and breadth of Cutter's Way.

There are a handful of films I turn to again and again. There are some films I will watch when I'm in any mood. There are only a handful of films that I have held in high esteem since I was in high school, bearing my own private history across decades, deepening their meaning over years.

Cutter's Way is all of these for me.
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Postby Jeff » Wed Feb 27, 2008 10:27 am

judasdisney wrote:Cutter's Way is my secret touchstone, a hidden chapter in history, a modern Hamlet, a film noir with ironic loud sunlight.


Just wonderful. Thanks.

I put up a couple of clips last night, which I hope doesn't deter anyone from watching the entire film.

The dump

The end

"What if it were?" is still the question.
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Postby IanEye » Wed Feb 27, 2008 1:21 pm

judasdisney wrote:Cutter's Way is not for everybody.


well, any movie with a soundtrack by Jack Nitzsche is off to a good start.

you are not the only one to see the allusion to Hamlet:

http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s292cutter.html

possible spoilers at above link

I haven't seen this film in a while, I will have to add it to my queue.

In some circles, John Heard is considered an asshole. Good actor though...
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Postby streeb » Sat Mar 29, 2008 5:32 pm

Annie Aronburg's post on Trudeau reminded me that Margaret acted in the great, lost Canadian film, Kings and Desperate Men - which is descended is some ways from the last episode of The Prisoner. Haven't seen it since it came out, but I'd sure love to.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085797/

On the eve of Christmas, an urbane, loutish and acidly cynical Montreal radio talk-show host (Patrick McGoohan) is taken hostage in his own studio by a band of crusading terrorists who want a new on-the-air trial of a comrade they feel was wrongly convicted. For collateral, the terrorists have also taken hostage his rich wife and mentally retarded son in their own home. The listening audience shall act as the jury and phone in their verdicts. As the trial progresses, disembodied voices, Christmas hymns, religious imagery, one of the terrorists relating the story of "The Wind in the Willows," the voice of a child singing "Come All Ye Faithful" in Latin reflect the psyche of the characters in moments of truth. All the while, the talk-show host must sustain the role of grand showman and project his wit and cavalierness to the listening audience, despite the tense situation. Captor and captive engage in a furious battle of wits.


Alexis Kanner kind of looks like Michael Stipe before he was replaced by the bald idiot currently filling the role.
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Postby Jeff » Fri Apr 04, 2008 10:42 am

One I haven't seen yet, but intend to:

Image

When mob associates turn up dead at the hands of a ruthless businessman, an enforcer is sent down to Kansas to investigate the incidents. What he finds is a man who is turning a seemingly idyllic town into a seething underbelly of corruption: drugs, bootlegging, and female sexual slavery. (IMDB)

I'm a sucker for depictions of seeming incongruity of ultra-violence and criminal depravity in the Midwest.

Opening credits of cattle slaughter. (The banality of its depiction reminds me of the opening montage to Blue Velvet, and the horrors underfoot.)

Final scene: Lee Marvin (hitman with a heart of gold) and Sissy Spacek (sex slave he'd rescued from meat-grinding Gene Hackman), free kids from an orphanage where they were being groomed for slavery.
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Postby lea123 » Wed Apr 09, 2008 10:34 am

Thank you, Jeff and judasdisney, for turning me on to Cutter's Way. I watched it over the weekend and was blown away.

Searching around for other reactions to it, I found this intriguing review:

I should tell you that there is a dark secret of epic proportions brewing beneath the surface of this story, one that is never openly discussed nor revealed, not even at the end of the film. Yet, we're always strangely aware of something within the narrative teasing us along, well hidden within the action; illuminated only in the subtext of dialogue; and story; keeping us deceptively riveted on the murder mystery, while imperceptively tugging on the coattails of our subconscious, drawing us further down a rabbit hole to peek behind the mask of a killer in that marvelous way only a master director, (Ivan Passer), can... Critics naive enough to have dismissed this "storytelling" as too "simple" have missed the secret of this film by a wide five miles.

The entire review is here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082220/usercomments

So...I've been wracking my brains trying to figure it out. I figure I'll have to watch it a few more times to decode this "secret". But I'd appreciate any help you might be able to provide...
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Postby sunny » Thu Apr 10, 2008 8:58 am

Welcome to the board lea123.

I haven't seen Cutter's Way, but you and judasdisney have made me want to in the worst way.
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Postby compared2what? » Thu Apr 10, 2008 6:10 pm

Hmm. "Overlooked" is an elastic word. But I love these, and want you to have a chance to love them, too, if you feel like it. Full double-feature linked below.


Don't Look Now

Nicholas Roeg's odd directorial genius is, for once, in the same place as a great movie, featuring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, and a famously very erotic sex scene, which happens to serve an artistic purpose, too. The artistry part definitely does tend to get overlooked, owing to the xxxtreme hotness. But c'est la vie, can't imagine to whom that really does any harm.

Inherently very RI. And a very good movie for fans of that creepy gnome video that went viral via The Sun, not long ago!

Official trailer

Dead Ringers

Seriously, why come David Cronenberg doesn't never gots any RI love? This is a truly superlative fucking movie, quite apart from RI concerns.

Among its numerous wondrous qualities are the mind-blowing performances delivered by both Jeremy Irons and Jeremy Irons, who star, respectively, as identical twin gynecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle. According to the Criterion Collectiton essay, "Dead Ringers is a definitively melancholic meditation on our very existence—on the sadness of what Cronenberg has termed “unrequited life.”." To which I say:

Well, yeah. However, if you don't allow yourself to be misled by the fact that the love is brotherly, occurs between identical male twin gynecologists, and is in part mediated by Genevieve Bujold, playing a Claire Niveau -- movie star, Mantle brother patient, and woman with a trifurcate uterus. -- it's obviously a classic Hollywood love story.

Possibly the Worst. Official. Trailer. Ever.

If I got every one of these links in order without error, I'll eat Werner Herzog's shoe. Plus I noticed while linking them that although I didn't select either on the basis of color symbolism, they are both way into the red. Hm.

Anyway: Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show!:


Don't Look Now, Part 1

Don't Look Now, Part 2

Don't Look Now, Part 3

Don't Look Now, Part 4

Don't Look Now, Part 5

Don't Look Now, Part 6

Don't Look Now, Part 7

Don't Look Now, Part 8

Don't Look Now, Part 9

Don't Look Now, Part 10

Don't Look Now, Part 11



Entr'acte (Not the dada work by that name. Just an entr'acte.)



Dead Ringers, Part 1

Dead Ringers, Part 2

Dead Ringers, Part 3

Dead Ringers, Part 4

Dead Ringers, Part 5

Dead Ringers, Part 6

Dead Ringers, Part 7

Dead Ringers, Part 8

Dead Ringers, Part 9

Dead Ringers, Part 10

Dead Ringers, Part 11

Dead Ringers, Part 12
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Postby lea123 » Wed Apr 16, 2008 10:47 am

Great call with Roeg's Don't Look Now...it's one of the few movies I own in DVD. Don't miss Performance and The Man Who Fell to Earth, either.

Last night I watched "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus", and although critics seemed to hate it, I thought it might be worth a mention here. It rates high on the dreamlike fairy tale scale, with Robert Downey Jr (a great and underappreciated actor, IMO) in full Wolfman drag and a cast of little people, giants, transvestites, etc. Arbus is a controversial figure in photography, and this film stressed her basic empathy and compassion for the "freaks" she photographed.

Most importantly, the movie made me go back to her work, and I was struck by how unflinching her gaze was. I think she has a lot to offer RI-ers, who seem to me involved in the same kind of steady witness to what's chaotic, frightening, sordid and disturbing just under the polite veneer of the world.
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Postby sunny » Wed Apr 16, 2008 12:03 pm

lea123:
I think she has a lot to offer RI-ers, who seem to me involved in the same kind of steady witness to what's chaotic, frightening, sordid and disturbing just under the polite veneer of the world.


lea, feel free to start a thread of her images. I think that would be great.
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Postby IanEye » Thu Apr 17, 2008 2:29 pm

sunny wrote:
lea, feel free to start a thread of her images. I think that would be great.


here are some that I used in the 'bong' thread:

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewtopic.php?p=178487#178487
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Wild In the Streets

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Sun Apr 20, 2008 7:33 pm

'Wild in the Streets' (1968) is a generation gap fantasy that is as 1968 as you can get, kind of 'Planet of the Apes' where the Woodstock Generation are the apes who take over America with massive demonstrations that overwhelm the authorities and LSD in the water to control Congress.

Image


Barry Williams, the future Greg Brady, has a brief scene as the young rockstar-turned-political demagogue helping his father rip the plastic covers off of the furniture as rebellion against sex-averse and cleanliness-obsessed mom.

There's also a cameo by Jack Ruby's lawyer, Melvin Belli.

Richard Pryor is about 20 years old and plays 'Stanley X,' the drummer for the rock band that ate America.

Ed Begley plays an old fuddy-duddy political boss who ends up in the re-education concentration camp dosed on mandatory therapeutic LSD in a peace sign-adorned robe prison uniform dancing in circles with other seniors while chanting "No fundraising dinners are the best dinners..."

Image

Ironically, Hal Holbrook as the young office-seeking politician allies with the rock star to get youth votes almost like a Robert Kennedy figure but later attempts to assassinate the rocker when he's taken over the country. This movie really is as 1968 as you can get.

From the VHS box-
"The idea of not trusting anyone over thirty is taken to a bizarre extreme in this film of American society that's set in the 1960s.

Christopher Jones stars as Max Frost, a malcontented teen and nationally famous rock star who's so popular he helps elect a U.S. senator (Hal Holbrook). Next, Max gets the voting age lowered to 14 and goes on to become President! His first act is to have everyone over 30 carted off to internment camps, as the kids take over the entire country.

Featuring Shelley Winters as Max's mother and Richard Pryor as a militant rock drummer."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_in_the_Streets
Trivia

* The movie features cameos from several media personalities, including Melvin Belli, Dick Clark, Pamela Mason, Army Archerd, and Walter Winchell. Millie Perkins and Ed Begley have supporting roles, and Bobby Sherman interviews Max as President. In a pre-Brady Bunch role, Barry Williams plays the teenaged Max Frost at the beginning of the movie. Peter Tork of Monkees fame also makes a cameo appearance as a ticket buyer.

* The storyline was a reductio ad absurdum projection of contemporary issues of the time, taken to extremes, and played poignantly during 1968—an election year with many controversies (the Vietnam War, the Draft, Civil Rights, the population explosion, rioting and assassinations, and the baby boomer generation coming of age).

* The original magazine short story, titled "The Day it All Happened, Baby!" was expanded by its author to book length, and was published as a paperback novel by Pyramid Books.

* A soundtrack album was also successful, and the song "The Shape Of Things To Come" (written by songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil) and performed by Max Frost and the Troopers, featured in the movie, became a #22 hit on the US Billboard charts.

* The "Shape Of Things To Come" contained a line There's a new sun, risin' up angry in the sky. As a Rising Up Angry became the name of a real-life Chicago radical group active from 1969-1976.

* According to Max Julien on the DVD commentary for The Mack, in which Richard Pryor co-starred, Pryor reportedly urinated on Shelley Winters's head while filming a scene[citation needed]. Pryor did not star in another film until Lady Sings the Blues in 1972.

* The movie was released on VHS home video in the late 1980s, and has recently (2005) appeared on DVD, on a twofer disc with another AIP movie, 1971's Gas-s-s-s.

* Garland Jeffreys wrote an unrelated song called "Wild in the Streets", which both he and Chris Spedding recorded in the 1970s. It became the title song of a 1982 album by The Circle Jerks.

* Bon Jovi also released an unrelated song titled "Wild in the Streets".
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Postby sunny » Fri Jul 24, 2009 2:07 pm

IanEye wrote:another 'murdered' film:
Mike's Murder

Writer/director James Bridges originally wrote and edited the film so that the story played chronologically backward, similar to what Memento and Irreversible did 16 years later. However, the studio got nervous, thinking it was too complicated and hard to follow, and had the film re-edited in chronological order for release.

This was the first project Debra Winger did after An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). After a poor reception from preview audiences, the ad campaign was changed, the soundtrack music was replaced and the film was re-edited. It was eventually released in 1984 after Winger had a hit with Terms of Endearment (1983).


there are some who say this film got a little 'too close' to the stark reality of Hollywood in the early '80s.

After a protracted postproduction period, Mike's Murder proves an intriguing, if not entirely successful, suspenser and paranoid mood piece. Resolutely a small, serious film, pic was made quickly and cheaply by James Bridges during the summer of 1982. Reported negative reactions at sneaks in northern California prompted drastic recutting. In addition, a score written by pop musician Joe Jackson was all but discarded.
Mark Keyloun's Mike is a casual, off-and-on-again lover of Debra Winger. He's a tennis teacher who earns additional dough as a small time drug dealer. Unfortunately, with his sideline activities come some unsavory characters, notably the uncouth, impulsive Peter, convincingly played by Darrell Larson. In short order, Keyloun is killed and Larson is informed by a former associate that he's 'a dead man.'

A modestly successful bank employee, Winger spurns friends' advice and begins investigating the realities of Mike's world, meeting some of his lawless friends and ultimately being threatened by the desperate Larson.

With its consciously repetitive scenes of driving around Los Angeles streets, film attempts a contemplative approach to the material and mood of impending doom. The attempt is both interesting and admirable - up to a point. As usual, Winger is wonderful to watch at all times, but her character is something of a cipher, and lack of any psychological angle holds down the film's ultimate achievement.
link: http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117793118.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&p=0


The Right Thing

Now that Warner Bros. archives has announced the release of James Bridges' Mike's Murder on DVD, it would be right and appropriate and respectful for Bridges' original cut to be included on the disc. I don't care if it's a lowball archives release. Because it truly isn't right for the sake of Bridges' legacy for the longer version to be tossed and forgotten. It's now or never. Seriously. Calling Jimmy Olsen!
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not fiction

Postby Evutch » Sat Nov 21, 2009 8:11 pm

thank you all for posting about the films, and and about the disappeared.
punishment park however, ( and i HAVE to try and watch that one,)
is really based on fact.
maybe not exactly as it happened, but punishment "parks" were put up ALL OVER the US in the 60s and 70s.
i saw them. and i am still suffering from what i saw.
PTS.
it's something i have yet toi really deal with.
kids were killed every way imaginable.
it was done cold bloodedly, and for sport.
women and younfg men.
no arrests were ever made, no charges. just put in camps and killed.
or killed in transit. and the transit was almost never to take anyone to a holding place.
the camps were death camps.
the dotted the US, but there were many in the upper michigan area.
seeing as it was very hard to escape and survive.
many were let loose in the desert, and many more were abandonned in islands either in the carribian, or off the north east where the weather could kill them.
some were dropped out pf airplanes in the carrib. or dropped in busses and sealed trucks from ferries in the great lakes.
some even worse.
more than a few were even gassed.

all this i know.

i knew some that worked on clean up crews, some that drove the busses, and some that guarded the camps or transport.

it's the greatest kept secret going in the USA.

i figure the number of disappeared to be ten to twenty times that of argentina.
and argentinas numbers are greatly underestimated.
greatly.

if the number was between one half, or one million, i would NOT be surprised.
i am dissappointed that this secret has been kept for all this long.
but then, it has taken a very long time for the people here to realise that what happened in chile and argentina, and elsalvador was planned and schooled for, and training done HERE to kill innocents there.
in the school of the americas.
we did that.
because we did it first. here.
and we took the playbook directly from the SS.
the NAZIS.
directly.
during the killing times, i met two ( three actually or more), but two people of power in todays world, of note. politicals, that you would all recognise.
both were directly involved in the killings.
and both smiled in front of me over it, and took great pleasure from it.
they smiles becuse they were sure i was to die.
i didn't.
someday, i hope to see their smile turn.
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