Almost too wacky to be tolerated and so overstuffed with gags that before an hour has passed, you'll be wondering what more you could possibly be confronted with. The plot is a mere suggestion and barely holds the strange mess of grotesque burlesque skits together. Singing robots, horny skeletons and gorilla suits abound! A rare, special stripe of divine inspiration has to strike someone, I think, for them to concieve of a scene in which elderly Basil Rathbone as a…
A couple moments that stuck with me:
– The transposed M monologue. Peter Kern performs Peter Lorre's appeal to the kangaroo court at the end of M (1931) while dressed as Hitler. Kind of took my breath away and I'm still not quite sure why
– The ~30 minute scene of Himmler's belly being rubbed while he trauma dumped to his masseur about astrology, military strategy and his responsibility in exterminating whole peoples
There were a few times during and after…
Something I just put on late last night because I couldn't sleep. It is my second attempt to watch it all the way through. DNF (2).
The contentious discourse on this film's Letterboxd page interests me much more than Oingo Boingo, the Elfmans and the film itself. I find FORBIDDEN ZONE to be impotent and aimless in its transgression, not terribly creative in the ways in which it recontextualizes and plays with 1930s-50s pop culture, very "male" in a way…
A perverse, doomed love story à la Henry James and D'Annunzio that could only have been birthed on the deathbed of Fascist Italy, concerning a Divine Child's erotic attachment to his governess/older friend, played by the elfin Mariella Lotti. Tears of pain on her translucent cheeks sparkle in spiritual harmony with the melodies of Nino Rota. Oh, how deliciously tragic...and shockingly creepy! Like Soldati with MALOMBRA three years earlier, Lattuada makes the gothic setting of the boy's ancestral castle feel like…
Maybe the best movie about what it's like to be a little girl obsessed with an older girl—to put another girlchild (a budding young thing, lost and unruly like you are, but you can't know that) on a pillar and steal glances at her behind hands formed in prayer, a prayer to the Virgin to make you just like her when you grow up. You see her body and yours entwined in a dream of things to come; her body…
Asylum cell shadows forming a crucifix on a dirt floor writhing with rats. Egg yolks bursting over a ruffled skirt, dripping thickly down innocent legs. A doomed tryst at the ruins of a Carmelite monastery. A prim señora turned pop-eyed and love-mad, swinging a horsewhip at the camera and bringing us all to our knees in the end. As Susana, there is a gleam in Rosita Quintana's doll-black eyes that suggests wistful familiarity with the bourgeois rancho she comes to…
A forlorn transmission from a glamour planet twilight world, ringing through skies cobwebbed over with love's labors lost. Resinous beads of indole drip down these webs—the gift of tears given many times over to souls who have submitted themselves to pure desire. This is the platonic ideal of melodrama. My favorite movie about love. I must admit that it's not about love at all. It's about countryside silence and city sidewalk sorrow; it's about exploitation and loops of human suffering;…
The perfect movie to watch with my own beloved mother while attempting to heal from a Cronenbergian health emergency.
Thank you to Tim for pushing me to finally watch this.
Joan Crawford is my heroine, my goddess, my amazonian angel, the best actress of all time and the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.
This is far more than a campy PSYCHO ripoff. It's one of the most heart-wrenching, genuinely tragic, finely acted narratives of trauma and mental illness unwittingly passed from mother to daughter ever committed to film.
Sometimes I think this is the only good movie I've ever seen. It leaves me ever more astounded and touched with each successive viewing. I think I could watch it everyday and never get tired of slipping into its waters...never able to anticipate the ways in which they will intoxicate me the next time. There's nothing else like WATERSMITH. Absolutely nothing. This is a sports documentary; this is a visual poem; this is sci-fi; this is suspense; this is pure erotism...you can find whatever you want to find in those sparkling blue waves and mutating superhuman bodies.
I had the privilege to watch PNEUMA again, this time on celluloid, at a very special screening, presented by Nathaniel Dorsky himself. While I don't have anything particularly brilliant to say about the film, I wanted to share, with you, my dear friends who also greatly admire the work of this singular American master, some of his own words on PNEUMA:
On the matter of the film being presented as part of BAMPFA's Psychedelia and Cinema series: "There is no…
Both everything and nothing you've heard about this movie is true. An undeniable work of genius and rare inspiration that went down my pineal gullet like battery acid and ichor. The best thing I've seen so far this year...haven't stopped vomiting green flames since the credits rolled.
This is a troubling melodrama, fundamentally about English class warfare and painted in lurid Victorian colors, despite its contemporary setting. The film seems to want abandon itself to delight in the suffering of Aline McMahon's formerly comfortable upper middle class spinster, but, sadly, it's 1935 and the Hays Code is brand new and as inflexible as depression glass. The greed and malice of the shabby Cockney con artists is never complicated with any sort of emphasis on class differences or…