talkin bout my generation

it's cool when things all come together. not like having your birthday fall on christmas/hanukah/president's day, but more like when your 7th grade english teacher assigns a 5-paragraph essay on the same book your neighbor gave you as a birthday/hanukah present the year before.

now we at the TCP have been doing this criterion thing for about 9 months and this summer just so happens to be the 40th anniversary of the summer of love, '67, the same summer of the monterey pop festival in rice-a-roni, cali. performers include the mamas and the papas, janis joplin, simon and garfunkel, jimi, and otis redding. a doc had been made for the 3-day music festival by d.a. pennebaker that is, wait for it, in the criterion collection. as clarissa would say, "way cool".

the mont pop fest is easily one of our most enjoyable viewing experiences. before watching it is helpful to know a few things:

• it was one of jimi hendix's first live performances in america, as well as the who's (who's'?)
• clive "endive" davis was in attendance and signed a young janis joplin immediately after
• the mamas and the papas were on their way out
• otis redding killed it

while watching, please notice how there is absolutely no corporate/brand presence.

at around 80 minutes or so, it's short, but it's rare when you can see firsthand the origins of cliches, and this concert gave birth to a good handful (e.g. the who violently smashing their instruments, jimi lighting his guitar on fire). worth a looksie.

and the shape of a question mark on his forehead

this week (as if we're really weekly) we decided the TCP needed an estrogen boost, so we went with jane campion's first feature film, sweetie. which is fitting, since it's also my first campion experience. aside from knowing of its australian origins and 1989 production date, going in my expectations = zero.

what is sweetie? who is sweetie? unfortuntately, these questions are answered at the midway point, when one of the most contemptible and repulsive characters ever put on film tazmanian devils herself into the plot. sweetie, you see, is the once-institutionalized sister to kay, our main character. everything sweetie touches turns to unbearable. you see that precious toy horse up there? it ends up getting coughed out of sweetie's mouth with gobs of blood and bile.

sweetie aside, sweetie is a beautiful movie. if you want to see how colors should go together and you enjoy well-framed shots, see this. however, considering everything else, such as story, sweetie's a tough one to sit through. despite a modest 97 minute runtime, the plot trudges like those huge guys that pull 18-wheelers with a harness strapped to their necks.

we each hit a breaking point. for me, it was the horse eating. for jim, it was the treehouse. i dare you to find out what i mean by this. well, you already know about the horse eating, but still...the treehouse...

thief's theme

Been a minute since my last post. Late Spring has not proved fruitful for the TCP. Speaking of fruit, one of my favorites is green apples. Thieves' Highway (not to be confused with Lost Highway) shares my produce preference.

Had to see this one dolo, cuz Kapil is allergic to black and white and I admittedly bailed on Jim.

TH is a simple crowd-pleaser with a simple demand: accept the lazy eyes of both leads.
The script is smart and the acting goes down easy. Like all movies set before 1985, much of your attention will be spent laughing to yourself (unless you're watching with other people, for some reason) how different things were then. The rest of your attention will be paid to how much maintenance driving a truck back in 1949 required.

Also, TH has what must be the origin of the ol' embarrassed-male-reluctant-to-say-'I love you'-on-the-phone-in-front-of-the-guys scenario.
And, Jack Oakie, on the right, was deaf during the entire shoot. Though he looks a bit off up there in the pic, his performance gives off no indication of his impairment.

go for the apples. stay for the acting.

(Instru)mentally Ill

Going into Marco Bellochio's I Pugni in Tasca (Fists in the Pocket), we knew little more than that the DVD cover art was ill. Right off the bat, we were drawn by the score, by Ennio Morricone, who Kiki acutely pointed out was an ill dude (and recipient of a 2007 Honorary Academy Award for Acheivement in music). He then promptly fell asleep.

He missed an old Italian masterpiece about a mentally ill dude (above) who believes that he'd be doing a great service to the world and his eldest brother, the only well adjusted member of a dysfunctional family, by killing his mother and younger siblings. In the meantime, he crushes on his own sister (dimepiece Paola Pitagora), takes a driving test, and hatches a plan to invest money in a chinchilla farm. Complicating things are his own conscience, a nondescript cranial malady, and the fact that chinchilla farms cost a guap.

Almost sounds kind of like a dark comedy right? It's not. It's definitely not.

Juan Apagado Spends a Lot of Time Wandering Around Town

We inadvertently kept it real Texas on Memorial Day by hitting up the local Tex-Mex spot and then hitting up the surprisingly thorough DVD section at Barnes and Noble where we decided on copping "Slacker," Richard Linklater's chronicle of a day in Austin.

Don't get it twisted. "Slacker" isn't "Dazed and Confused," despite the fact that both document generations of disaffected youth. It's also not to be confused with "Slackers," the Devon Sawa star-making vehicle. For better or worse, the film that put Linklater on the map (sort of) is still regarded as the OG "indie" flick. But for me, it's cool because it's like a time capsule to the early 90's. One of the dudes was sporting a dope Batman T-shirt that I used to rock ca. '89. Dunkin' Donuts cereal makes a brief cameo. And then there's the drummer from the Butthole Surfers showing off her newly acquired (and above pictured) Madonna Pap Smear. But it's probably not for everybody. Linklater's intent here was to structure the plot around loosely connected ideas interwoven by creative transitions. In short, it's something of an experiment and you'll probably get more out of it if you view it as such. If you like plot, don't come around here. But if you like stories, Linklater's got a chair and a beer coozie with your name on it.

Tatis F@%k!

After a long layover, the TCP train finally got back on track and made a stop in 50's France for auteur Jacques Tatis' "Mon Oncle" and with all due respect to whoever, all parties involved unanimously decided that we probably don't like you if you like this movie. Although the movie is a comedy and is therefore not as joyless or over earnest as some past TCP stuff dealing with essentially the same content (satire on postmodern alienation/ consumerism), it was still the most difficult TCP viewing thus far because the jokes just don't hold up anymore. The fact that Tatis' opening sequence, overall visual aesthetic, and oddball overall feel (killin' it with the wide angle-dope set pieces) were so ill helps me understand why people think this is a masterpiece, but it did little to make the movie more palatable.

Conversely, if you like Mr. Bean, you might enjoy this. Incidentally, Tatis is the progenitor of Mr. Bean as per Rowan Atkinson's own admission. IMO, the verdict is out on whether or not that helps or hurts his case.

In closing, I want to start a flame war on imdb about this movie.

baby sham

since my netflix account was backed up this week, jim and i were forced to scour blockbuster colonia for a criterion movie. we quickly passed on armageddon, which we're saving for a later date. i had my pick and jim understandably had issues with it. for some reason the check-out line spanned the entire sci-fi section, which bought jim more than enough time to find a plan b. thank the lord the cashiers are poorly trained.

here's the taglines of the harder they come:
dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail in shanty town;
With a Piece in His Hand He Takes on the Man!; and the clearly babel-fished,
He Makes Women and the Charts and is on top with both.

the harder they come was lying in the drama section, but this jamaican tale should have been placed with the foreign films. subtitles are a must unless you are rastafari. speaking of the subtitles, they have a mind of their own here. some scenes have them, some don't. it's their chill way of trying to teach you the language, or something.

you could say the harder they come is like the OG get rich or die trying, without the speech impediment.
BO!