1970s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[mizo]

(and where does that come from? I know I've seen an earlier film -- b&w? -- where somebody helps a stranger park/crash their car. I seem to recall them taking casual glee in it. Jerry Lewis, perhaps?)

Woody Allen does it in Bananas.

Anyway, count me in as another big fan of Animal House. I first saw it in my freshman year of college, having been aware of it since I was a kid. At the time I was revisiting some favorites from childhood, including Caddyshack, and I was mainly shocked by how mediocre my older self was finding them. Of course, that only made the greatness of Landis's film stand out in sharper relief. Belushi's is the rare comic performance that is so expertly calibrated - with such precise and, above all, graceful timing - that it was not in the least dampened by years of anticipation. And of course the movie has one of the all-time great descent-into-chaos conclusions, replete with those incredible (and wildly unfair) digs at the ending of American Graffiti.

[flyonthewall2983]

Landis had a good point about how Hollywood comedies now don't end in complete chaos like this did anymore. The Judd Apatow movies are particularly guilty of this, and I think he cited a few as examples.

[domino harvey]

The ending chaos of Animal House is also helped by delivering the most perfect punchline imaginable

SpoilerShow

"Do you think you could give us one more chance?"

[Lemmy Caution]

(and where does that come from? I know I've seen an earlier film -- b&w? -- where somebody helps a stranger park/crash their car. I seem to recall them taking casual glee in it. Jerry Lewis, perhaps?)

Woody Allen does it in Bananas.

Thanks for that.
I couldn't place it.
IIRC, a brief throwaway gag.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

I... comme Icare (Henri Verneuil 1979)
In an unnamed but French-looking country, a president is assassinated and Yves Montand’s attorney general refuses to sign off on the commission’s lone gunman report. He sets up his own commission and through some grim deductions uncovers a wider conspiracy. I was delighted that the decade that gave us so many great paranoid conspiracy thrillers had one more hidden treat to deliver with this film. Drawing heavily on existing JFK lore, this one has some novel beats that I quite enjoyed. For instance, how many conspiracy films grind to a halt to play out the famous Milgram experiment from Psych 101 for literally 20 minutes? One, this one. The ending is predictably bleak, but in these kind of films, that’s par for the course. The director gets a lot of mileage out of making the audience paranoid enough to recognize the danger in a certain architectural design long before the payoff arrives, though! Highly recommended.

Domino, how did you get to see this one? There's a blu from LCJ Editions but I can't tell if there's English subs.

[domino harvey]

I saw it via back channels. According to DVDFr, while the Blu-ray is region free, it does not contain subtitles (and it needs them). I'm actually not sure where the subs on the circulating copy come from... it would be a great release for some enterprising boutique label for sure, though!

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Wow, no French subs either. I figured it had to be a back channel deal but the blu is still pretty tempting. I heard about this one from an Elio Petri podcast but maybe that's evidence enough why some label here hasn't scooped it up yet.

[therewillbeblus]

Mannen på taket (The Man on the Roof), a Scandinavian police procedural channeling Melville by way of The French Connection, is far more interesting in its inconsistent construction than its influences suggest. Bo Widerberg implements style liberally per usual, giving us an abrasive POV death early on after a Le Samourai cold open during the credits, only to fall back into a seemingly slow-burn 'detective following banal leads' motif for its middle. This section is juicier than it lets on though, as some of the confrontations speak more to sociopolitcal commentary and grey logic from contradictory perspectives, adding spices of differentiating ideas to color in the plot's momentum, and plays particularly well in today's climate of questioning the role and power of police. But then the long last act kicks off and the steady foundation we've been building crumbles into a total detour of nonstop siege action. The suspense finds a place between the manic and composed, where the camera follows children and other innocents in equal measure as those who sign up for this gig, and the experimentally chaotic cinematography contends with expected methodology. In many ways the film follows the mold of the episodic TV crime shows of today but embodies that design with erratic choices, infusing the predictable layout with unpredictable releases. I can't say I loved this film as much as many seem to, but it was a lot of fun for the creative manipulations Widerberg inserts into what could have otherwise been a passive programmer.

[therewillbeblus]

Fimpen starts with a hilarious idea, emasculating a cocky soccer player by letting a six year old kid best him on his casual walk through the city, and the fallout is executed so well that this seemed ripe to become a new comedy classic. Then it reveals itself to be a kind of family film, but one that's also in no way about family or youth or identity/value development. There are cute scenes early on, especially the gameplay with the kid participating right alongside the adult players on the field, but the entire film loses steam after its first act when we are provided access to the kid's life and are given no reason to learn or feel anything. A real missed opportunity after a great pitch. If the film had just chosen any direction and been confident enough to stick with it closely, I'm sure this would've been more enjoyable, but instead it meanders to the finish line without a purpose.

[therewillbeblus]

Foul Play: Unlike Into the Night, this 'Wrong (Wo)man' nighttime comedy-thriller did not hold up from childhood when I used to see them as cut from the same cloth. Revisiting both recently, the only connective tissue is a loose attempt at homaging Hitchcock's multi-setpiece wrong man film into a role-reversed female-male quasi-romance. While Into the Night's commentary is squarely on the yuppie ennui as a focal point that casts a wider net onto Reagan era suburban disillusionment, and taken surprisingly very seriously with incredibly dark comedy serving that core identity crisis' desperate yet apathetic rot, Foul Play goes for cheap laughs at exploiting the 70s feminist movement for being cartoonishly radical and ultimately fragile as an ethos. Sure, the bits with Hawn and her girlfriend have some decent potential brewing, but the Dudley Moore stuff is meanspirited in two directions- at him for being a man having perversions, which are only considered pathetic because he is emasculated by rejection (otherwise the embarrassment wouldn't mean anything to an unforgiving audience in Hawn's camp) and also toward Hawn for being 'unfairly' reacting to him picking up signals that weren't there. This scene dilutes all credibility from the totally-fair claim that women "leading on men" is not their problem, by making the audience share that obliviousness to an exaggerated degree that becomes problematically anti-feminist. The ease at which Hawn resigns any sense of these principles by the last act silently affirms that "it" wasn't all that important anyways, as if that's a choice that has to be made. I wonder what this film would have been like if made by a woman. Oh, and everything that 'happens' is pretty uninteresting as well, with even the dwarf gag so totally obvious from a mile away, stunting any chance at working- which basically describes the fizzling path of any decent ideas from their conceptualization to their execution.

[domino harvey]

Anybody know where an OAR copy of Sargent's Goldengirl can be found?

Coming next year to Blu— one more to check off the To See List from those 42nd Street Forever comps!

[colinr0380]

That was one of the most interesting looking films from the collection too, with the trailer including drugs, feet kissing, people running over and over into walls and probably Nazis! Just in time for the (fingers crossed) Olympics next year too!

[domino harvey]

37. Across 110th Street (Shear, 1972) -- ORPHAN If only Schreck still came around, he would get onto everyone for letting this be orphaned and then get onto me for not placing it higher.

Assuming we both vote in the next iteration, it won't be an orphan anymore as I watched it last night via the now OOP Kino Lorber Blu-ray and thought it was terrific! You can see the seeds of so many complex city portraits to come (the Wire looms large, as does Homicide: Life on the Streets, in no small part due to Yaphet Kotto's presence) planted here. The film also has some incredible hand-held photography that puts the viewer right into all the bustle, yet unlike so many films that try and fail to emulate this look, the film is fiercely intelligent in its editing and elisions when needed. It's a smart and twisted portrait of a world without clear divisions of right and wrong, and no one escapes its critical eye. And like the best of its decedents, the film gives us an unending parade of colorful characters who all seem to plausibly have existed before the film started and (some of whom) will continue to exist when it ends. I have some minor complaints about the ultimately unsatisfying last ten minutes or so, but the wind up is strong enough that the pitch doesn't really matter. Would make a great NYC city portrait double bill with the even better Taking of Pelham One Two Three

[Dylan]

That was one of the most interesting looking films from the collection too, with the trailer including drugs, feet kissing, people running over and over into walls and probably Nazis! Just in time for the (fingers crossed) Olympics next year too!

I've seen Goldengirl and when it ended I felt like I had sat through a truncated "digest" version of a much longer film. Sure enough, a trip to IMDB revealed that it was first intended to be a TV miniseries, and a longer cut was even broadcast in a three-hour time slot on NBC in 1981. So there is definitely some interesting history behind this production that the Blu-ray extras will hopefully address. It will be great if the Blu-ray also includes the broadcast version, or the additional scenes from it.

[therewillbeblus]

Norma Rae: I felt ambivalent when I saw this too young, but what an excellent piece of empowerment for human agency that Ritt masks in the skeleton of a social problem pic. It is that of course, but the advocacy extends beyond the systemic issues into the roots of the human mind to adopt attitudes and commit actions. Field is outstanding, but Ron Leibman deserves special mention as Reuben Warshowsky, who commands his first few scenes in a fashion that demands attention by captivating the audience with the same methods that work for Field and others for his cause, not through manipulation but dedicated human decency. What really stood out to me as novel for cinema in particular is the way in which norms of human behavior are made flexible against expectations. Take the moment after Reuben and Norma interact after his funeral speech. The camera lingers beyond the economy of their dialogue on Reuben's dialogue with a civilian, as he bluntly admits that he needs whatever help the man can give. It's a deceptively simple exchange, but here's a strong-willed man initiating a conversation at a funeral to ask for any and all help (licking stamps, to be specific), a contrast of perceived weakness and strength coming from separate ideologies on masculinity rarely seen in movies or real life, but the operation of agency that can be done if one is committed to actualizing the full capacity of their determination.

The walk-through scene is jawdropping intensity- as Reuben stops to pay attention to the workers, not primarily because he has an ulterior motive to convert them but because he actually cares about the working man from a humanist philosophy, again issuing a sensitivity contrasted with his aggressive force who physically and persuasively breaks down social barriers in abstract and concrete terms within his time there. Even Beau Bridges' scene where he stresses his fury at Norma's disruption of her normative wifely duties plays against predictable film-logic and descends into compassion and warmth through loud actions shining light on perspective that average people can acknowledge and use to mend rather than erupt further as we're used to seeing in Dramatic Setpieces. The film isn't a documentary, but Ritt draws real people without overstating their complexities, showing how the isolating nature of activism's initiation is both difficult and simple if one takes a moment to acknowledge the self-imposed blockades to exercising our wants and needs.

[therewillbeblus]

37. Across 110th Street (Shear, 1972) -- ORPHAN If only Schreck still came around, he would get onto everyone for letting this be orphaned and then get onto me for not placing it higher.

Assuming we both vote in the next iteration, it won't be an orphan anymore as I watched it last night via the now OOP Kino Lorber Blu-ray and thought it was terrific! You can see the seeds of so many complex city portraits to come (the Wire looms large, as does Homicide: Life on the Streets, in no small part due to Yaphet Kotto's presence) planted here. The film also has some incredible hand-held photography that puts the viewer right into all the bustle, yet unlike so many films that try and fail to emulate this look, the film is fiercely intelligent in its editing and elisions when needed. It's a smart and twisted portrait of a world without clear divisions of right and wrong, and no one escapes its critical eye. And like the best of its decedents, the film gives us an unending parade of colorful characters who all seem to plausibly have existed before the film started and (some of whom) will continue to exist when it ends. I have some minor complaints about the ultimately unsatisfying last ten minutes or so, but the wind up is strong enough that the pitch doesn't really matter. Would make a great NYC city portrait double bill with the even better Taking of Pelham One Two Three

I'll add to the praise- this really is The Wire in the 70s, and I can't recall the last time guerrilla filmmaking was as effective as in the opening sequence, which exposes the kind of Murphy's Law sloppiness found in real life de-glamorized crises. That plan significantly falls apart due to the barriers of physical space populated with unexpected adversaries, animate and inanimate, in the streets- here implicitly presented as inflexible containers that indiscriminately trap people looking to stretch their agency with fatalistic futility, prisons masked as freedoms. This setpiece is as superficially authentic as it is a visual metaphor for the systemic blockades and dirty compromises flooding all levels of corporeal experience, from micro to macro in these interconnected sociopolitical networks throughout the rest of the film.

It's a treat to see a film so committed and insightful about its literalized vision as a transplant of a grey worldview, refraining from magnetizing too hard toward any of its postured subgenres in blaxploitation, melodrama, crime, neo-noir, or police procedural pics, and becoming nothing more or less than the abundance of color found in a raw portrait of a multifaceted city in the process. The film melts down seemingly separate milieus into a non-consensual abrasive collision and suggests that consent was given by the nature of existence, and simultaneously stresses the fixed alienation of these individuals and social contexts from each other in segregated philosophical frameworks. Fatalism sits hand-in-hand with the passionate energy to try to fight it, and watching Quinn and Kotto force a blend to make rigid lines blurry, complementing and challenging one another to impact the systems external to them, gives one a sense of pragmatic optimism just as it airs the loneliness of isolation immutably insured into each man's cold stare of a half-defeated soul. They may be burning rubber but at least they're revving the engine.

If the film resigned itself to any particular steady mood or clear genre expectations, maybe I'd be disappointed by the ending too, but I thought the last act worked well precisely because it emulated the messy chaos of the entire picture that came before it, which never promised anything other than what we get. The antagonist looking over the roof at the children playing before opting for an act that encompasses rebellion, charity, and surrender perfectly summarized the enigmatic themes of connection and disconnect in a visual motif- and the freeze-frame final shot is as unnerving a noirish imprint as they come- erasing any opportunity to breathe, process, or even know a fate that's both intensely important to us and yet not at all in the grand scheme of things. The filmmaker throws that care right in the trash, not to exploit but because life's neutral like that. I'd wonder if the Coens watched this before filming No Country for Old Men if it wasn't the backbone of their worldview already.

[therewillbeblus]

Two Larry Cohen masterworks:

Black Caesar: My memory's fuzzy on all the blaxploitation films I watched about a decade ago, but if this isn't at the top somebody needs to point me in the direction of what is. I find the best blaxploitation films to be ones that transcend the perfunctory staples of the subgenre to ask rhetorical questions of the audience. Fred Williamson's Tommy Gibbs is enigmatically drawn as a product of his environment without didactically falling back on a simplified form of sympathy. He exists and persists in a fundamentally corrupt milieu that prescribes the fate of compromised morality- and as we watch him exercise unethical behavior, the characteristics he chooses to self-actualize with are ambivalently left as both strengths and complacent deficits.

In the few films I've seen of his thus far, Cohen has demonstrated that he opts to lean his sensitivities towards non-whites in social pictures, and clearly takes pleasure in watching Gibbs ambush white mobsters and corrupt police officers, assimilating to their empty codes of conduct, while shrugging off their surprise at his bold actions aimed to achieve equality or even supersede their power. In these cathartic scenes, Gibbs chalks his unethical maneuvers up to racial stereotypes in a cheeky condescending goading, outright shaming these white people, as they should have 'known better'. However, there's an irreversible misfortune embedded in this proclamation that necessitates a diffusion of identity and culture to engage in their world, a devastating implication that only by playing into unfair stereotypes can Gibbs communicate his strengths, and these actions ultimately dilute his sense of self and make him no better than them in the process, deserving a fate no different, or better. Gibbs' offering to his mother early on is a careful bout of compassion that indicates that he's trying to have his cake and eat it too- succumbing to the white capitalist culture-less world, and also attempting to hold onto his community's values of reciprocity for his blood, taking care of his mother divorced from her attitude towards him.

This cannot be sustained though, and Cohen portrays this narrative as one of empowerment contingent on the loss of self, all bottled up into this coating of supreme entertainment, which cannot keep these determinist tragedies from exploding. The narrative time stamps seem superfluous until we get the final one to end the film, and in an aloof shot of the city we're hit with a profound and unsettling sense of meaninglessness- a date and time to define this life insignificantly, as just another story in just another day in a world of inevitable isolation, existential concession, and failure. James Brown's score and the vibrant camerawork bring this film to life in ways I wish more 70s films would, and which God Told Me To would amplify in just a few years. Gibbs' character is one of the more interesting antiheroes I've seen in a film wearing the false clothes of a crime programmer; someone I was drawn to, repelled from, rooted for, and knew was destined to earn the fate his active shedding of dignity would carve out for him- a complex statement that says nothing easy or specific, and is all the more powerful for that refusal to summarize depth, while simultaneously and paradoxically stepping in to meet the audience on their superficial terms.

Bone: I watched this last week, before Black Caesar, but still find myself struggling to write about it. Cohen's directorial debut is operating on a wavelength nearly impossible to convey in a thinkpiece analysis: it's a satire on racism and the suppressed ennui of suburban life, but on a deeper level the film meditates on feelings of alienation, impotence, and indolence when the slightest provocation prods the bubble that protects us against ourselves- meaning our inability to cope with a multicultural milieu beyond our privileged scope. Cohen pokes the bear by using the caricature of the enigmatic black man as an emblem of threat that deflates the facade of comfortable contentment, and also offers a perverse hope for escaping such a torpid state through a reminder of the endless possibilities that live in our peripheries. This is a mirage of course, and the cynical finale is as revealing of the impermanence to hold onto aspirations that exist outside of the familiar as the self-actualized personality of (the excellent) Yaphet Kotto is disturbing for embracing his stereotype, similar to the tragic portrayal of Black Caesar.

One of the many ironies is that Kotto is disrupted from his 'other'ness through a consensual response from Patten, where he cannot feel empowered any other way than aggressively, deviantly, and alone- thereby finding intense discomfort in cordial and harmonious engagement; while Patten's life is disrupted to a place of comfort by the insertion of aggression, deviance, and foreign stimuli. There are many methods to explore racial tension and the effects they have on their respective populations, but I've seen few as unique and surreal as this path. Also, as good as Kotto and the other core principals are here, Jeannie Berlin steals the movie in her elongated scene, when she unexpectedly infiltrates the atmosphere of desolation and absurdist humor in Duggan's flaccid interactions with her with one of the rawest declarations of trauma I've seen. The ambiguity of who may be responsible isn't as important as the sensation of unpredictability piercing through Duggan's world wherever he hides. It's not only a strange black man that endangers his passive faux-sense of safety, but a ubiquitous menace exuding from any social interaction haunting the space he occupies- home turf or not.

[domino harvey]

I am an established opponent of the late 60s/early 70s New Hollywood aesthetic, so I wasn't optimistic going into Jerry Schatzberg's Puzzle of a Downfall Child, but I loved it and think it's probably the best case scenario for this kind of madly intercut character piece. Your enjoyment slash tolerance of the film will rest in your ability to withstand Faye Dunaway's incredible, museum-ready over-acting, but I honestly quite enjoyed her extremely worked-over but nonetheless impressively mounted perf as a model with a deteriorating mental state. The film's elisions and bridgings and filmic references both explicit (Shanghai Express, Daughter of the Dragon) and homaged (Red Desert in the hospital scenes, with all of Dunaway's food unnaturally discolored) make for a smartly dressed package as well. I didn't like Schatzberg's later Scarecrow (and was indifferent to his Street Smart, which showed none of the visual vocabulary on display in Puzzle) and I gather in the 70s at least he leaned into that kind of aimlessness over the more showy Resnais-type editing tricks on display here, but are there other works worth seeing from him more in Puzzle's vein?

[knives]

The only other one I’ve seen, Panic in Needle Park, is definitely more ‘70s aimlessness like a more lethargic Midnight Cowboy.

[swo17]

I mostly find it interesting for being the film that got Pacino cast in The Godfather. (And he is good in it)

[therewillbeblus]

Getting Straight is an aberrant, tonally-confused movie that is nonetheless a perfect emulation of the counterculture movement, released the year of Kent State. The narrative is either profound or cluelessly astray, likely a bit of both, as Richard Rush floods every scene with an unpredictable interaction or predicament involving a new person or group or groups arguing over causes, identity, relationships, values, and coming out passionate, apathetic, secure, or lost seemingly divorced from any rhythm. There is an excitement and simultaneous exhaustion to this messy ballpit of spirit trying to find a host in a corrosive milieu. This is a less-confident or funny version of Inherent Vice's gravitational marijuana-laced fugue state hold on its audience, but because it's so erratically conceived, the film delivers the appropriate disjointed anxiety to echo the energy from the era its born from. I'm not surprised to see that this film got such negative reviews, it's a shambolic vacation through quicksand that meshes education, conformity, bohemianism, and rebellion, twisting the nature of participation to show the insecurity of harmony in community and the thrills of individuality, and vice versa, without the haven of safe optimism in any one source.

There's a satirical bite here where nonconformists dip their feet in capitalism, hippies make misogynistic statements in the company of their crunchy love interests, feminists chase a magazine version of the American dream, druggies join the army to "beat" The Man but secretly harboring a yearning to have a sober purpose, and yet embedded within the comic posturing are seeds of dread, whether signals of infinite and helpless estrangement from one's most intimate partner or the Kent State-inspired protest, which is one of the most horrifying depictions of police brutality I've seen on film. It's telling to the mercurial mood of this work that Gould attempts to treat the incident with tasteless jokes afterwards, but also oscillates back to the ethos of the rebels more than most "involved" characters. When acidic commentary is delivered it's not with clean digestibility, but in scenes like one where a Dean offers half-measure solutions as panic occurs in the background, Gould exploding into sincere advocacy populated with lampooned sexual references yet never faltering from the tenor of social justice. It's perverse without descending into extremes to meditate on any cheeky wink to its perversity, instead imbuing an internal logic where perversity is the only possible synthesization between so many antithetical ideas. Even Gould's final dramatic scene with Bergen is inexplicitly heartfelt or sardonic, and may be taking on polytonal form, but dares to rest in ambiguity.

Gould is a great casting choice because his own behavioral inconsistencies help construct a subtly torn character who we struggle to attach to because he's so unattached to himself, yet are inescapably drawn to because he resembles that conflict in all of us. Also, Harrison Ford plays a spaced-out hippie neighbor in his most inhibited perf that I've ever seen, which is reason enough to give this a shot. I expect many here will hate it, but it's one of the most curious and thus interesting films from a period of filmmaking already bursting with expressions of existential and social confusion. The ending of inevitable chaos via narrative combustion is the only sensible solution, but still finds the time to grant us an equally-potent dose of satirical desert, in a didactic thesis spouted by Gould that is itself ambiguous and runs counter to the concept of collective movements' core service of actionable measures. The funny thing is that he's not necessarily wrong, and the film pieces itself together amongst the physicalized havoc to grasp at an ideologically-plush Hollywood ending, squeezing in one last pronouncement of stimuli-discordant irony before the credits!

[therewillbeblus]

The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun
A 'wrong (wo)man' psychological thriller/road movie drenched in psychedelia, that is in dire need of image enhancement to digest its full effect (thank you Tarantino, from the future). Samantha Eggar carries the film as an empowered female individualist, who maintains a sense of self-actualized characterization even whilst she and we begin to doubt her sanity. It's not an easy grift to pull off, but this is a grindhouse gem fueled by pop-art incisions, potent personalities, and intrusive shocks to film grammar that trigger narrative ellipses, all in good fun. The film plays like a fusion of Gaslight, Le monte-charge and North by Northwest set on the tracks of Two-Lane Blacktop's raw, lyrical yet palpable manifestation of free yet lonely spirit, but erupting into its own tone of bewildering urgency.

I haven't seen the 2015 remake, but have to imagine that any intrigue it merits will inevitably be deprived of the pulsating 70s aesthetics and rugged rhythm of the original. This bleeding aura of sloppy edits, music and lighting engages the audience with such a specific perverse tension that an otherworldly spell is cast, framing the most irrational projections as a sensible internal logic to the time. The subject matter fits so well in an era of psychosocial confusion in a cultural wasteland that the film's trajectory of becoming boiled down to the psychological defense mechanism of displacement is terrifyingly believable rather than exasperatingly disposable.

SpoilerShow

The need for a nearly 20-minute 'explanation' by Reed with deliberately-paced self-indulgent fervor, interrupting the climax in the most abrasive fashion, is a hilariously-executed, cheeky jab at narrative-hijacking. Yet the punchline that follows is even better- as Eggar's 20-second, cooly-delivered Last Words emasculate Reed's accumulated satiety, to end the movie with a stunned look, impotent lowering of the gun, and rapid edit past interpersonal catharsis. We see Eggar exit the police station, and are left to assume that Reed and his wife were convicted, I guess, but the subversive deflation of expected showdown theatrics or narrative follow-through is so bold and deliciously enunciated that I'm still elated from its anti-high. I'm a bit surprised Tarantino loves it so much (even though the rest of the film is so firmly up his alley) because the finish is the exact opposite approach he takes to his own endings, running counter to his ethos of what movies can and should accomplish!

[domino harvey]

I've only seen the remake. Here were my thoughts:

the Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (Joann Sfar 2015) A 93 minute argument in favor of Freya Mavor being astonishingly beautiful, this remake (the original is unseen by me) is such a transparently trifling riff on the international cinema scene of the early 70s that style and aesthetics are required to go, as Pavement once put it, miles and miles. I already agreed with the film’s thesis re: Mavor before it even started, but there are worse ways to pass the time than what gets cooked up here. I was thankful that the narrative, in which a young woman makes a journey through several small towns she’s never visited only to be told by all the locals that she was just there the night before, didn’t resolve itself in a cheap answer (ie no, it isn’t all a dream), even if the eventual solution is quite ludicrous. Ultimately an empty film, but one I’d admittedly watch again.

[therewillbeblus]

I've heard it's an almost identical remake, but I really can't believe that any modern adaptation would retain the surreal aesthetics, nor go to such audaciously irreverent lengths with the film's final act and aggressive narrative deflation that occurs in the closing moments

[domino harvey]

and here's those on my shortlist, that didn't make my 50
(listed alphabetically, by director first name)


The Italian Connection Fernando Di Leo

There's zero chance this will ever make any list of mine, but I must confess that this film weirdly reminded me of A Medal For Benny, where a secondary character gradually morphs into the main character, and here as there it's a plus because Mario Adorf is far more entertaining than hitmen Henry Silva and Woody Strode (who are both so wooden here that it's obviously the result of being directed to be that lifeless, but still), despite the pair allegedly inspiring Tarantino when scripting Pulp Fiction. While Adorf provides some entertaining forward momentum as the movie ramps onward, that's not enough to recommend the film. What IS enough to recommend is that this movie contains one of the stupidest, most insane, crazy, gloriously implausible payoffs to one of its running gags that ranks amongst the most novel and unpredictable things I've ever seen in an action movie. To wit,

SpoilerShow

Adorf, clinging to a moving van, headbutting his way into the front windshield of the speeding vehicle and offing the driver

I erupted into loud, incredulous laughter at the sheer brazenness of the audacity to even attempt such a moment, and it gave me great joy to see something I had indeed never seen before