All the great silent comics confronted the problem of how to survive the modern world. Chaplin met modernity with consternation, while Keaton attempted, with measured success, to master it, but only Harold Lloyd greeted it on equal terms. Where both Chaplin and Keaton lived in the world as poignant anachronisms, Lloyd chose to be of his world and time, and for his troubles he always came out as a winner, the most perfect avatar of the American century the silent…
Despite its title and lineage, a lot of smart people don't think Curse of the Cat People is a horror movie. The estimable William K. Everson, in Classics of the Horror Film (1975), lamented that the title “tried to pass off a fairy story as a horror yarn” and in A Pictorial History of Horror Movies (1973), Denis Gifford wrote that the film was “a brilliant piece of supernatural cinema, but a long way from horror.” But I’d argue it…
From what I've seen the dispiriting nadir of 1976's wave of Kongsploitation movies (worse even than A*P*E. and King Kung Fu.) A campy, queer British musical that aggravates and depresses due to the disappointment of its dissolute failure to live up to the potential of any of its seductive appellations. So bad that Giada's grandfather's awful production from the same year is a better time at the movies.
Jules Feiffer and John Cassavetes deserved residuals. Roy Scheider and Jennifer Jason Leigh are very good here, but mostly this broad portrait of male toxicity is an object lesson in the kind of mess that can result when talented actors are allowed a little too much lassitude, and while I'm generally pretty tolerant-unto-enthusiastic about cinematic efforts that lean toward the theatrical, director Peter Medak is a bit too obvious and awkward in his effort to translate the excesses of the stage to the inhibitions of the screen (made all the more egregious by the odd wrinkle that it apparently never was a play).
All you need to make a movie is a girl, a gun, and a life insurance policy.
The fact this doc spends more time on how the woman who co-owned a major gay porn book store in Los Angeles and co-produced a bunch of gay adult movies in the 80s had trouble accepting the coming out of her son than it does on how the AIDS crisis affected her business and the community it catered to and employed is both inevitable and understandable given the subject's daughter made said doc. But that's also why someone other than…
