Escape From New York (screens Oct.13 and Oct. 15 at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK screens Friday October 13th at 7:30 pm and Sunday October 15th at 9:50 pm at the Cleveland Cinemathque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

All his career John Carpenter has told folks that he’s really only wanted to make “westerns.” Yet he has consistently delivered horror and science-fiction and the occasional one-off nonconformist like a good TV biopic of Elvis Presley (featuring Kurt Russell) or the police thriller ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, which is regarded as a partial remake of RIO BRAVO. Okay, but not since his student-film days, if I’m not mistaken, has the dude actually delivered a genuine western.

Maybe he’s doing one of those things from The Little Prince, in which there’s a drawing of a lamb that is so perfect it’s just the box in which the lamb resides; you will never actually see a lamb, but you can still just imagine how the drawing is exactly right (sort of like my career). Same with John Carpenter and his “westerns.”

Carpenter’s 1981 flick ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, at least, does have the DNA of a proper Hollywood-studio western, in the Howard Hawks no-funny-business filmmaking style (most recently personified by Clint Eastwood’s work behind the cameras), hitched to a high-concept dystopia plot.

The Straight Story (July 1 & 2 at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[THE STRAIGHT STORY screens Saturday July 1st at 5:00 pm and Sunday July 2nd at 6:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

A few odd weeks in 1999 it seemed like the movie values system had turned upside down, most agreeably so. First, Cleveland native Wes Craven, synonymous with gore and horror, delivered MUSIC OF THE HEART, a wholesome, PG-rated music drama, based on fact, starring Meryl Streep (Craven said he finally wanted to direct a film that his conservative parents could see). Then David Lynch, a name equated with extreme, transgressive and positively diseased themes in cinema, made a deliberately G-rated all-ages feature THE STRAIGHT STORY. Released by Disney, in fact.

Whether Lynch also had underaged or prudish family members is unknown to me, and it did seem to me that THE STRAIGHT STORY’s MPAA label wasn't a little bit of a marketing ploy, dangling in front of the art-school pseudointellectuals and cult viewers who comprised the Lynch fanbase the question of what can the creator of BLUE VELVET possibly

get away with under a G rating?

Men Go To Battle (now on video)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Apparently the slam on MEN GO TO BATTLE has become, for those critics who even noticed it, “mumblecore Civil War.” Yes, guess the inarticulate, no-budget aesthete isn’t just for dull romantic comedies set in and around film schools any more.

But that snarky classification would do a slight injustice to director Zachary Treitz’ debut feature. The okay production actually put me more in mind of famously micro-budget 1961 Oscar-winning short A TIME OUT OF WAR. That film wowed the Academy at the time with the notion that the War Between the States could be distilled into one little, violence-free vignette that probably cost less than the boots used in John Huston’s famously overbudget THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE.

With its average-man’s POV of the Civil War, MEN GO TO BATTLE is set in 1861 rural Kentucky, where the semi-literate Mellon brothers half-heartedly maintain the nonproductive family farm – when they’re not trying to just sell it off and be done - amidst horseplay and no particular interest in the big fight between the Union and the Confederacy.

The Land (now on video)

Let me put it this way: THE LAND, directed by Baldwin-Wallace graduate Steven Caple Jr. – and shot entirely and impressively in Cleveland - is technically superb  and put together in a highly attractive and lyrical manner.  Yet for Christmas I sent it to a friend (you might know her if I mentioned her name) who recently left the Cleveland area for a fresh start and marriage in New York state. My accompanying Christmas card hoped that the movie would provide her with even more reason for gratitude that she and her son got out of this vicinity safely.

That’s because THE LAND - which made it to Sundance, no less, and now has a video release via tony label IFC Films - is a street-crime melodrama, slickly shot in some of the shabbier parts of Cleveland. Which is really saying something, shabby-wise. Here are well-compose stages found in situ via our iron bridges, glittering night skyline, rooftops and old brick buildings testifying to a bygone era when industry boomed here, but set against a downbeat tale of slum desperation and young innocence lost.

I don’t think many Cleveland-hyping T-shirts were sold at Sundance, don’tchyaknow?

(Then again, the Cavs won later in the year, and that turned everything around, right?)

Gold (now in theaters)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

GOLD – no relation to the Roger Moore adventure vehicle of the same title from 1974, or even the borderline-science-fiction German epic of 1934 (whose climax of titanic explosions got re-used as stock footage by numerous Hollywood B-movies) - made its premiere late in 2016, apparently with the faint hope the Bob/Harv Weinstein production would be deemed Oscar worthy.

But it earned no nominations for that kind of gold whatsoever (funny, the Roger Moore GOLD did get an Oscar nod for the Elmer Bernstein/Don Black music; check out the forgotten score online), and the feature directed by Stephen Gaghan, rather quietly made its way into most theaters in early 2017.

I caught it on a pure whim and was rather surprised how much I liked it. Even with a Matthew McConaughey star-turn heavy on the scenery-chewing, it still felt like a picture actually made for grownups, a little bit more than most. Then again, so would the Roger Moore or the German one, in these lamentable times.

The plot is said to “inspired by true events” – yeah, that old carny come-on – one is surprised that ROGUE ONE didn’t make the same boast - but I do believe GOLD derives from an actual case that involved a Canadian company. McConaughey, laying on the McConaugheyisms really thick to match a paunchy waistline, plays Kenny Wells, hucksterish businessman carrying on his father’s Reno-based mineral-prospecting company, that has never made it out of the boiler-room leagues. In fact, by the 1980s the company is almost nonexistent, running principally out of a Nevada bar and the home of Wells’ long-suffering waitress-lover (a marginalized Bryce Dallas Howard).

Naqoyqatsi (January 28 & 29 at 3:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Museum of Art Morley Lecture Hall)

It took almost as long for the second set of Star Wars theatrical features to appear as it did for Godfrey Reggio to come up with the finale in the trilogy that KOYAANISQATSI started in 1983. The good news...No Jar Jar Binks.

But the insipid all-CGI space creature would fit right in, however.

The title of this non-narrative would-be mind blast translates as "war as a way of life," which made for great ad copy in the post-9/11 era but seems only tangentially related to the subject material, which is the rise of a digital age and a computer-linked world economy/culture, replacing the natural/physical world of the earlier two features.

Much of the film is, in fact, virtual, rendering pixel-created soldiers, pop idols, lovers, landscapes, and moving windows and frames of alternating elements. Corporate logos like Levi and Coca Cola and the symbols of the world's great religions alternate with each other (get it, huh, get it, huh?). 

Powaqqatsi (January 28 & 29 at 1:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Museum of Art Morley Lecture Hall)

This 1988 nonfiction feature was second installment of director Godfrey Reggio's `qatsi' trilogy, preceded by KOYAANISQATSI and followed many years later by NAQOYQATSI. This one is arguably the most accessible, beneath the symbolism and MONDO CANE-style juxtaposition of luxury and Third World poverty.

Hopi-speakers shall no doubt recognize the title as translating as "life in transformation," and theme is reflected in scenes shot in developing nations around the world, where women, children and laborers, along roadsides and in mud ditches, toil to subsist and build.

Meanwhile gleaming skyscrapers and concrete highway overpasses rise in the background, but it is uncertain whether any of the ragged low-caste peasants here will ultimately benefit from the high technology and globalization, or just end up being but bricks in the retention-wall.

Delicatessen (December 10 at 9:20 p.m. and December 11 at 8 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

I was recently wondering what the year 1991 was good for (most of the early 90s, for that matter). Oh yes, I started with an interesting new movie-review publisher – who immediately went out of business. Later, I found out they had started up again and neglected to tell me. When I finally tracked them down and re-introduced myself, the reaction was more or less, “yes, you still work for us. We’ve been waiting to hear from you - what took so long?” Believe it or not, they weren’t even a Cleveland publisher, despite that management style, a bit too familiar in my flatlining career.

But 1991 also stands out, for many other moviegoers, for when the international release (pushed heavily by Terry Gilliam; I remember the Cleveland International Film Festival premiering it here) of the French science-fiction satire hit DELICATESSEN. It brought to wide attention the filmmaking duo of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, who went for some time simply by the tandem credit Jeaunet-Caro, with their Tim Burton-esque (or Gilliamesque) eye for grotesque fantasy, but in a mildly European fairy-tale/fantasy vein, mixing menace with whimsy and a hint of the unspeakable in a recipe that is all their own.

The Battle of Algiers (December 2 at 9:25 p.m. and December 3 at 6:35 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

That the 1966 Italian classic THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS is still even exhibitable right now (of course, nowhere near as widespread as DOCTOR STRANGE) shows the US still possesses admirable freedom of expression (R.I.P. Fidel Castro). In light of the alleged War on Terror it's a little like TRIUMPH OF THE WILL screening at a

cinema near you in 1944 - although that comparison does injustice

to Gillo Pontecorvo's film. While the director's sympathies were

anti-imperialist, his feature takes no obvious sides and has no

heroes or villains in the customary Hollywood/propaganda sense.

And the casualties and atrocities are never less than human.

Ostensibly THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS depicts the uprising of the Arab-based Algerian independence movement - the FLN - against 130 years of French-colonial occupation in North Africa. Lensed in newsprint-gritty B&W where it happened, the neo-realist feature looks exactly like a documentary (opening titles emphasize "No newsreel footage") and recreates the dire move- and counter-move

of an urban-guerilla war and terrorist bombing campaign against foreign occupiers.

Just Eat It (November 9 at 5:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Food Bank)

Finally, a food-stunt-marathon movie that Morgan Spurlock (SUPERSIZE ME) didn’t think of. And perhaps he should have.

In a headline-grabbing stunt that would be funny if it weren't so sobering, Canadian filmmaking couple Jen Rustemeyer and Grant Baldwin determine to live for six months off discards (with perhaps occasional handouts from family and friends). The impetus for this commitment to dumpster-diving and creative mooching comes from hearing that 40 percent of all food in North America goes to waste

The couple's docu-diary shows the progress of this unappetizing experiment, and guess what? (SPOILER ALERT) Far from starving, the couple take home more food than they can possibly consume. Even gourmet and “organic” premium-specialty food, thrown out behind markets by the truckload. Grant gains an unflattering amount of weight.

One-Eyed Jacks (November 4 at 8:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

The only directorial credit for Marlon Brando was this very adult western - still a pretty daring concept for 1961 - for which the mercurial and increasingly rebellious star Brando took over filmmaking chores after original helmer Stanley Kubrick withdrew because of (all together now) creative differences.

Now Stanley Kubrick, as we all know, was notorious for overshooting, exposing take after take until he figured he had perfection. Tyro director Brando took it even further, exposing more than a million of feet of celluloid and ballooning the budget thricefold, ultimately costing Paramount a then-astronomical $6 million. The producer claimed that Brando may well have shot literally more than a million feet, a world record. Maybe that’s hyperbole, but the resulting film was a box-office disappointment, needless to say. But it is still respected by many. Of course, it helps to be a Marlon fetishist.

The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (August 20 at 10:10 p.m. and August 21 at 6:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

 

Director Penelope Spheeris came to prominence in 1981 with her punk-rockumentary THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION. In 1988 she encored with a second installment of rock-musical freak sideshow stuff. This one was shot on a visibly larger budget. And for this go-around it's a carnival of preening black-leather hedons and poseurs of the hair-metal decade, resplendent in lurid arena-rock excess in Los Angeles, onstage and in self-aggrandizing interviews.

The mullet-wearing interviewees render opinions of drugs (against), alcoholism (for! for!), selling out (for), satanism (for), exploiting women (you betcha!). "Rock and roll is basically music made by people who were thinking with their crotches," said Paul Stanley of KISS, cuddling in bed with three Stepford groupies.

Meanwhile future reality-TV dad Ozzy Osbourne states if weren't a rock star he'd be in prison (almost immediately gangsta rappers stole that line for themselves in practically all their hip-hopumentaries). On a similar note, a probation officer discusses "de-metaling" lawbreaking rock fans.

The New World (August 7 at 7:15 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

Filmmaker Terence Malick attempts numerous audacious and foolhardy things

in the lyrical, trance-like 2005 historical drama THE NEW WORLD, pulling off some of them beautifully. Among his victories is giving us tabloid-bait actor Colin Farrell as a character who would have to sign any motel register as "John Smith." And yet you don't giggle.

Yes indeed, it's Malick's impressionist retelling of the Pocahontas story and the settling of Jamestown, Virginia. It envisions the childhood of Anglo-America as an experience of first-love adolescent romance and heartbreak, the bittersweet deflowering of a virgin continent. With the canny casting of Farrell the feature manages the formidable achievement of reclaiming the Pocahontas legend from elementary-school pageants and the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time Disney musical cartoon POCAHONTAS, with its chorus line of raccoons and singing Mel Gibson. In fact, the `P' word is never spoken here.

The Decline of Western Civilization (July 9 at 9:10 p.m. and July 10 at 6:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

 

In 1981, this famous look at the American west-coast punk-rock musical underground was an eye-opener in those halcyon, post-disco days of Olivia Newton-John and the Bee Gees. Fights broke out frequently at screenings (imagine that; today people would only be shot). Shock-rockers of later years may have raised the bar of ridiculous indulgence and post-adolescent nihilism (or, if you're a fan, heroic revolt against yuppie consumerism), but there's historical import here for those interested in the time period. Or the mere concept of musicians who don't seem to care about Billboard charts or Red Bull sponsorship.

Ron Reyes, the frontman of Black Flag before Henry Rollins came along, shows us the spray-painted closet where he lives for only $16 per month. Exene Cervenka, back when she was still dwelling in domestic bliss with fellow X member John Doe, displays her collection of fire-and-brimstone Christian evangelical tracts picked up off the streets of LA. Staff of the essential punk journal Slash assemble an issue, despite the typesetter complaining about all the cigarette burns on the pages (thanks to desktop PC publishing not a problem much anymore).

Notorious (July 2 at 5 p.m. and July 3 at 6:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

Yes, what the chances that most of the internet-educated kids who show up for this Alfred Hitchcock revival wind up rioting in the streets because they thought it was that rap movie about the Notorious B.I.G.? It’s okay; bottles being thrown and cars overturned will be good practice for the upcoming Notorious R.N.C.

 

As for this NOTORIOUS, know that it’s classic Alfred Hitchcock, a crackerjack spy thriller on the surface that hints at all sorts of perverse desire and undercurrents of psychological aberrations

beneath its glossy 1946 Hollywood surface.

Setting is the midst of WW2. Devlin (Cary Grant) is an Allied spy who gets close to Alicia (Ingrid Bergman), the “notorious” femme of the title. As the wealthy daughter of a known Nazi turncoat, she’s regarded by upper crust as an amoral, lascivious playgirl (in today’s terms, think “reality-TV star”). But she’s really a good girl at heart, Devlin learns.

The turning point in their relationship comes with a legendary steamy kissing scene, lasting a full three minutes. It shows nothing explicit, yet is somehow hotter than a lot of what goes on in R-rated movies. Hitchcock supposedly had a merry time getting that past the censors, chiefly by tweaking the script and dialogue to make it seem like all they’re doing is talking about chicken dinner.

Metropolis (May 21 at 9:35 p.m. and May 22 at 3:45 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque

I have to confess, I haven’t seen this particular “2002 restoration” of Fritz Lang’s classic METROPOLIS. For those of you smart enough to know that movies go all the way back to the 20th century, you may be aware that various editions of this 1926 German Expressionist science-fiction spectacle have circulated, some missing about a half-hour or more of footage.

The long, long film was typically cut to pieces by unscrupulous theater owners to more comfortably fit their timetables. Director Lang, fleeing the Nazis for a Hollywood career, didn’t exactly have the opportunity to pack all his reels in the luggage. When Berlin was bombed during WWII, copies of what would have been considered the “original” METROPOLIS all wound up destroyed. From time to time a new alleged restoration of the film would show up – a famous 1984 colorized one from composer Giorgia Moroder using still photos as storyboard bridges to fill in the gaps in the missing chapters.

But it was in the early 21st century that (in addition to all the jobs going to China, the middle class getting exterminated and the prospect of a good life being stolen from all but the top two percent of rich people (oh, happy graduation season, by the way (good luck paying those student loans with part-time minimum wage McJobs (if you’re even lucky enough to get one (being the son or daughter or niece or nephew of a company VP might help; I hoped you all planned that))) a copy of METROPOLIS more complete than any other extant surfaced in South America.

(Now, what are the chances that the late, great SF/fantasy buff David Massaro, Cleveland’s answer to Forrest J Ackerman, probably had a print of the authentic, complete METROPOLIS on one of his cluttered shelves – how well I remember his residence - all this time, but nobody paid attention to him about it. (typical Cleveland situation (just like nobody in the real world will pay attention to your resumes and employment applications, grads (or did I mention that already?))))

Experimenter: The Stanley Milgrim Story (now on video)

As of this writing a guy is going around the trash-tabloid media (which is pretty much the media in general) claiming to be the illegitimate son of iconic actor William Shatner. This dauphin wants something like $170 million in damages.

Damages?! KHAAAAAAN! Hey, if I could raise the funds, I would pay millions to go around claiming to be the illegitimate son of William Shatner. I was born in the right time frame, too. Do not get me wrong, I love both my parents. But if could finesse Shatner and my mother into agreeing that they shared a night of forbidden passion in Cleveland sometime around 1963, then I could go around being "Charles William Shatner Louis Cassady." I think that would really open doors for me, even in this deathbed-economy Cleveland job marketplace.

Imagine, I could let "dad" Shatner relax and take it easy on his ranch while I did all those Holiday Inn weekend fan conventions and TV guest appearances for him. I could sign my name to countless toy phasers, copies of Tekwar and old TV Guide issues with T.J. Hooker on the cover, as Mr. Shatners authorized heir/representative. I am even willing to maintain a long-running feud with anyone claiming to the illegitimate son of George Takei. It would be a great next generation thing, we can all agree.

Right now all I can offer you is this: if you see the new meta-biopic EXPERIMENTER, you will get to see the uncommon sight of actor Kellan Lutz playing William Shatner playing the late psychological researcher Stanley Milgrim. And where else can you get that?

Rotor DR1 (now on video)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Here’s one Ohio-made movie that flew under the radar of the Cleveland International Film Festival, quite literally. Shot largely in the Canton, Ohio, director Chad Kapper's low-budget SF adventure jumps on two hot audience-draw bandwagons at once. ROTOR DR1 addresses both the appetite for YA dystopian futures along the lines of THE HUNGER GAMES and DIVERGENT (you really won’t believe how many of these are out now in the self-published book market) and fascination with remote-controlled "drone" camera craft.

The premise is that in the future, a virus has wiped out 90 per cent of humanity, leaving survivors subsisting in an anarchic wasteland (which pretty much looks like the Buckeye State, or did you guess that already?). Here, the only signs of functioning civilization are airborne drones delivering largely unused medicine from...somewhere.

Man of Aran (January 24 at 1:30 at the Cleveland Museum of Art Morley Lecture Hall)

Long before reality-TV made you wonder what was real and what was scripted, the first name- brand documentary filmmaker, Robert Flaherty, was way ahead of the Kardashians in terms of artful artifice.  I like to think that Flaherty's films will still be screened when the Jenner-Kardashian sideshow tent is closed and forgotten. But I’ve been wrong before.

The 1934 MAN OF ARAN is Flahertys famed, elemental view of the hardy inhabitants of Aran, a stormswept island off Ireland's west coast, sometimes romanticized as the UK equivalent of the literal ends of the Earth (ah, its not Cleveland after all, as so many have claimed) for its barren shores and harsh climate.  

Flaherty, his wife and assistants spent years living here, researching and building their own film-processing lab. The feature is arguably more of a docu-drama than a documentary; the `family' at the center were unrelated islanders, carefully cast, and Flaherty avoided prosaic community activities like church, socializing and cattle-driving.  

Ornette: Made in America (August 15th and 18th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[ ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA screens Saturday August 15th at 9:15 pm and Tuesday August 18th at 8:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

I just figured out how Bill Cosby could engineer a career comeback. He could co-star in a bunch of Woody Allen movies. Maybe Roman Polanski could be the guest director. Thank you, you've been a great audience. Drive safely. Good night.

Oh, is there a movie review to do? Sorry, I've been so busy filling out job applications, I didn't notice. Just as I didn't notice this past June when "free jazz" composer and Afro-American arts icon Ornette Coleman died at 85 of a heart attack. I suppose since it wasn't a police shooting incident or anything sordid, it didn't make the headlines - except possibly in Fort Worth, Texas, where Coleman is a favorite local son.

The celebration of "Ornette Coleman Day," September 29, 1983 (I remember that day; I think I was filling out a job application. Nothing came of it) in Fort Worth kicks off ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA, the eccentric 1985 docu-meditation on Coleman that was also the final feature of maverick counter-culture filmmaker Shirley Clarke.