Flipside Movie Emporium

[matt header]

Sir Beltmann:

As for the digital projection of Saraband, we have a digital projector available for any of the three theatres, depending on which film is the most popular. We don't use it very often, and at first we showed Saraband in the second theatre (to the right), but it just didn't have enough customers. And it is supposedly Ingmar Bergman's wish to have it shown as projected through a digital projector, which I found somewhat surprising.

[beltmann]

Believe me, it took a special kind of willpower to write that down and let it stay.
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"When I was in Barcelona they showed pornography on regular television. I'm assuming it's the same way in Mexico since they also speak Spanish." - IMDb user comment

[the night watchman]

[beltmann]

[beltmann]

[beltmann]

[the night watchman]

[beltmann]

Just cuz I could.
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"When I was in Barcelona they showed pornography on regular television. I'm assuming it's the same way in Mexico since they also speak Spanish." - IMDb user comment

[Danny Baldwin]

I am profoundly transfixed by those bananas.
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Danny Baldwin

View My Reviews

[matt header]

LOL x infinity. That's one of the coolest things I've ever seen.
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"I don't like talking to people I know, but strangers I have no problem with." -- Larry David, "Curb Your Enthusiasm"

[matt header]

[the night watchman]

Dancing bananas give meaning to a cold and indifferent universe.
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"If you're talking about censorship, and what things should be shown and what things shouldn't be shown, I've said that as an artist you have no social responsibility whatsoever."

-David Cronenberg

[beltmann]

Jiggly fruits of any kind warm my cockles.

Make of that what you will.
_________________
"When I was in Barcelona they showed pornography on regular television. I'm assuming it's the same way in Mexico since they also speak Spanish." - IMDb user comment

[beltmann]

8/15 ? 8/21

Since I had only seen three Astaire & Rogers films, I made a point of catching a few others on TCM. My favorite was Swing Time, but all of them have their virtues:

The Gay Divorcee (Sandrich, USA 1934)

Swing Time (Stevens, USA 1936)

Shall We Dance (Sandrich, USA 1937)

The Barkleys of Broadway (Walters, USA 1949)

Others in preferential order:

The Big Red One - The Reconstruction (Fuller, USA 1980/2004)

Ivan the Terrible, Part One (Eisenstein, Russia 1944)

Ivan the Terrible, Part Two (Eisenstein, Russia 1946)

The 40 Year-Old Virgin (Apatow, USA 2005)

The Brown Bunny (Gallo, USA 2004)

Thunder Bay (Mann, USA 1953)

The Ballad of Jack and Rose (Miller, USA 2005)

Beyond the Sea (Spacey, USA 2004)

Sex Is Comedy (Breillat, France 2002)

Streamlined Swing (Keaton, USA 1938)

As for The 40 Year-Old Virgin, I laughed so hard I think I embarrassed myself. (Sidebar: I once had a job that required the disposal of fluorescent tubes, and let me tell you, this movie knows how it's really done.) It also contains far more useful insights into what people want from sex than Breillat?s Sex Is Comedy, which is one of her most entertaining but, paradoxically, one of her least provocative and least interesting films. If such aimless, talky, dour brittleness is Breillat?s idea of comedy, I guess that helps explain her other films and their gruesome, ruthless notions about sex.

Speaking of movies containing infamous sex scenes, I finally caught up with The Brown Bunny, a movie about a professional motorcycle racer traveling to California and obsessing over a romance that ended in tragedy. Although the notorious scene at the, uh, climax could have made all of its emotional points with far less explicit imagery, this otherwise minimalist, lonely road movie never steps wrong. The story is unrelentingly bleak, but rarely have internalized guilt and melancholy been evoked with such naked vulnerability: Gallo's central performance commands attention precisely because it is devoid of ego. A lot of people have complained about the long shots of banalities?filling the gas tank, bugs splattering on the windshield?but I would argue that all of them seem perfectly calibrated to sustain the movie's intended mood and psychological intensity. (Besides, Gallo's vision of American roads has its own kind of beauty.)

I haven't seen the Cannes cut that was uniformly heckled, but it appears that Gallo's re-edit has vastly improved the movie. In fact, I watched it twice in one sitting, and the second pass was even more moving?the scene with Cheryl Tiegs, especially, gains as we recognize that the moment's true subject is how both characters are seeking some level of needed comfort and tenderness.

Eric
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"When I was in Barcelona they showed pornography on regular television. I'm assuming it's the same way in Mexico since they also speak Spanish." - IMDb user comment

[the night watchman]