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Reviews
Getting Married (1978)
Seen from a different perspective... this is not a happy story
Oh, my - what a trip this film is.
There is something unpleasant and discomfiting about the whole premise of Getting Married - our being asked to sympathize with any young man insensitive enough to crash one of the most stressful weeks of a woman's life and ruin her planned nuptials. And what kind of silly bride would jilt her intended at the altar to marry a lovestruck pursuer whom she barely knows, who has been acting like a psycho for seven days attempting to woo her? What does that say about her stability? At least, in The Graduate - which this movie shamelessly rips off - we see chemistry between Ben and Elaine and understand that they have an established compatibility and have fallen for one another. It also ends with a coda questioning the wisdom of their decision, as they seem destined to become their miserable parents. Getting Married is neither as sophisticated nor as adult.
Envisioning the scenario of 'Married' from the Mark Harmon character's point of view, I can imagine what a nightmare it would be, and how much it would wreck the groom's life and break his heart, if a lovesick pursuer destroyed his wedding. It might spell disaster for the bride as well, if she barely knew the suitor and went along with his scheme impetuously.
I know, I know - Getting Married was intended as a frothy romantic comedy, and I should take it in that vein. But it might have worked better if the scriptwriter had more carefully established the prior relationship (the emotional synchrony) between the Michael Carboni and Kristy Lawrence characters, and turned the Howie Lasser character (Harmon) into more of an ass who bamboozles Lawrence into thinking otherwise. Instead, as presented here, we get no scenes of intimacy between Michael and Kristy; even when the story opens up the door on this possibility, it drops the ball. And Lasser seems like a pretty class A dude, willing to fight for his fiancée. Any woman worth half her senses would choose him over the smug, monomaniacal, and possibly sociopathic wallflower played by Richard Thomas.
Is there any universe that could actually introduce half of what this guy Michael does, without implying that the character is a certifiable nut? I include on that list: his "Marry Me" billboard, his entrance as a white knight on a horse (a getup that he apparently whips together in about 10 minutes), and above all else, conning his gal pal into posing as his intended to register a phony marriage at city hall - the point where the film dives into all-out lunacy. An act of fraud? Sure, why not, if it helps him get the girl. (SMH)
There are also logical holes large enough to drive a train through them - my favorite is the notion that Carboni only informs his parents of the wedding less than a week before, and they ask no questions at all - and, bizarrely, end up making elaborate preparations for another ceremony, but never ask where the bridal party is. This plays like something out of The Twilight Zone.
The film is never as creepy as it could have been, and it has some inspired touches, including fine supporting turns by Van Johnson and Vic Tayback, and an original, gentle romantic song diegetically composed by the Carboni character and performed nicely by co-star Fabian (albeit exhaustively overplayed). And Armstrong was an ideal choice for Kristy - you can see why any young man would lose his heart to her.
But the material has an unsettling quality that undercuts the gentle uplift sought by its creators. And it sinks beneath the weight of its own implausibility.
Judy's Little No-No (1969)
Deserves to be lost
I discovered this sloppy but fitfully amusing drive-in movie while looking at mid-late 70s progammes for the Arcadia Cinema in Kenmare, County Kerry, Ireland. At the time, said movie house offered "special late nite adult only" shows, and I assumed quite naturally that 'Judy's No No' was a soft or hardcore porno about a woman and a vibrator, as the title implies - or perhaps a nudie cutie of Herschell Gordon Lewis's pre-Blood Feast era, or a kinky live show of some sort.
Instead, it's a bargain-basement comedy, light on the skin with one softcore lovemaking sequence, about a gorgeous stripper who gets conked on the head and chucked into the ocean by some jewel smugglers, and resuscitated by a beach-dwelling heartthrob.
The film suffers from a surfeit of problems, including a key tonal miscalculation. The majority of women, upon being abducted, tossed to their death in the waves, fished out and then pursued, would be shell-shocked, if not clinically traumatized. Judy, on the other hand, acts happy go lucky and carefree, and - even upon her beachside deliverance from the watery depths - looks impeccably coiffed, made up and manicured, as if she's just finished posing for a Cosmopolitan cover.
Funniest aspect for me is a game show music style soundtrack that plays over the heroine and her rescuer's shoreline trip to Miami in a Cessna.
'Little No No' is never as technically incompetent as a Doris Wishman film. To his credit, director Sherman Price at least knew where to place the camera and how to edit. Price's sole claim-to-fame prior to this outing was apparently a proto-Borat hidden camera romp that followed Weegee through Europe and witnessed his crazy stunts. So we get a basic level of directorial know-how that keeps this from being truly abysmal. And lead John Lodge was a capable actor.
Yet there are enough visual non sequiturs and sound production lapses, and the lighting and cinematography are shoddy enough, to confine this stinker to Davy Jones's Locker.
Miele di donna (1981)
"Welcome to the Red Room" it's not.
Years ago, in the primitive days of 1980s VHS, Blockbuster Video routinely cobbled together respectable arthouse films and C and D-grade exploitation pictures to comprise its "Foreign" section. Gianfranco Angelucci's 'Honey' falls into the latter camp. For years, it was only available in a poorly dubbed, pan-and-scan VHS version, with a truncated runtime and an alluring picture on the back of nude Clio Goldsmith climbing into a Victorian bathtub, in a bizarre room walled with stacks of cotton - and they circulated this cassette at many Blockbuster locations. If memory serves, Media Video distributed it.
More recently, a European blu-ray firm decided to remaster the picture in 4k and issue it in letterbox, subtitled, with its full runtime - so I got my hands on a copy, eager to check it out again, and suspecting that the excisions from the movie could account for the mediocrity and/or lack of clarity.
No such luck. I'm afraid the restoration didn't help matters. This is a murky, dull, unfocused picture, apparently intended as scintillating and erotic, a kind of softcore Alice in Wonderland, but boring as hell. It has several gauzy smoker-calibre love scenes (including female-on-female foreplay, shot through the latticework of a boudoir screen in the said bathroom, and voyeurism courtesy of a bedroom mirror), clumsy attempts at bawdy humor, cheap production design, a grating and drippy score, and a story that travels absolutely nowhere in a hurry. There are also sleazy touches throughout, such as a dildo-shaped remote lightswitch, that add nothing other than crude yuks; watching this is like playing "where's Waldo" to find the perverse easter eggs. Goldsmith (then the future sister-in-law of Queen Camilla Parker-Bowles) was gorgeous, to be certain, and the movie benefits from a semi-intriguing framing story, with the gifted Buñuel vet Fernando Rey as a harried, victimized book publisher. Otherwise, this is a Eurotrash-stuffed frozen turkey.
Given a little more skill, intelligence and taste, the creators might have produced something along the lines of the original Emmanuelle, but anyone who expects that degree of sophistication or sexiness will feel sorely disappointed.
The Amazing Transplant (1970)
Z-grade, all the way
This ridiculous, trashy thriller was helmed by the notorious Doris Wishman - here directing under a male pseudonym, Louis Silverman. A quarter of the shots are out-of-focus; the acting is wooden; she lensed it in such a way that most of the actors speak off-camera, so voices could be dubbed in post; when we do see lips moving, the dialogue is often out of synch. There are visual non-sequiturs and jump shots galore. At one point a woman falls dead when a strangler just barely touches her throat. The movie, in other words, is comically inept. There are half-a-dozen pretty nude bodies on display, but otherwise this is a real snoozer, from the Ed Wood school of directing. The ugly guy who is playing the detective investigator looks like a Muppet. Oddest feature for me is an poorly-chosen female chorus on the soundtrack, atop one of the rape scenes, that reminded me of Mia Farrow's title theme in Rosemary's Baby, also a little bit of one of the Country Joe McDonald pieces over a consensual love scene in Jens Jorgen Thorsen's Quiet Days in Clichy. The Amazing Transplant is strictly for connoisseurs of barrel-bottom cinematic trash - and even they may find this dull.
Amanda by Night (1981)
Superior to run-of-the-mill porn - if slightly overrated
This accomplished, if slightly overrated, hardcore thriller was directed with intelligence, verve, and some polish by Orson Welles collaborator Gary Graver, under a pseudonym. Giving one of the finest dramatic performances in any adult picture, Veronica Hart proves why Paul Thomas Anderson termed her 'The Meryl Streep of porn'; she's emotionally resonant with a solid dramatic range, and with a little redirection back in the day, easily could have made it as a mainstream Hollywood star. (In fact, Anderson wisely cast her in bit parts in Boogie Nights and Magnolia years later). The thriller narrative thread feels a bit derivative of Pakula's Klute - a psycho with an S&M fetish knocking off hookers - but Hart brings to her characterization far more depth and dimension than required. ABN is several planes removed from the mechanical, clumsily acted fly-by-night excuses for most porn features. The sex here is no holds barred and raunchy - with all manner of variations - no surprise given the presence of Ron Jeremy as a crooked, slimebucket vice cop. I didn't exactly find ABN erotic. But the movie itself held my attention due to its lead actress; I couldn't tear my eyes from Hart. I wish ABN spent a little more time exploring Amanda Heather's psychology and motivations, and less time on repetitive sexual acts - I could have done without an orgy in the middle of the picture, for instance. But if you're looking for classic porno chic with some substance, you couldn't do much better than this.
Les galettes de Pont-Aven (1975)
Lewd, dated, misogynistic comedy
Though obviously intended at the time as naughtily charming, a "chapeau bas" to the wiles of the lusty field-playing Gallic male, this picture has aged terribly. The gifted Jean-Pierre Marielle, who made a career out of playing philandering rascals in such superior pictures as Le Sex Shop and Calmos, here gives us an even earthier incarnation of his trademark cavaleur. In 'Les Galettes,' he's Henri, the rogue, bed-hopping painter fetishistically preoccupied with T&A - on his canvasses and off.
I watched the first third of this picture, and found it chauvinistic but naive and harmless, like the imaginings of a horny adolescent boy. That is, until I reached the sequence where a friend of Henri's essentially rapes a young woman off-camera while she screams at him to stop... Then the female character saunters downstairs post-coitally with a huge smile on her face, and lewd visual indications of her arousal. All to the tune of the friend's assurances that she may have shouted "No, please, DON'T!" but secretly loves getting it. The implications here are the same as those of thousands of stock porno films.
This was one of the most upsetting, offensive, disgusting moments I've ever seen in a movie. I have nothing against sex or nudity in a film but plenty of issues with any movie that only depicts women as mechanical objects of self-gratification. As a rule, I try to judge the politics of a feature by the era in which it was made, but in this case I wanted to bathe after I finished.
Crows Are White (2022)
Unique, magnificent documentary.
This spellbinding documentary resists all classification and defies comparison. First-time director Ahsen Nadeem originally set out to helm a straightforward documentary portrait, a sociocultural examination of organized religion as filtered through the lens of extremist, mountain-dwelling Japanese Buddhist monks. But midway, he began to realize that the real motivation belying his quest had less to do with the taciturn monks than with his own complicated relationship with faith and culture... He faced an immense challenge, in reconciling his fundamentalist Muslim upbringing with his love for an American woman... and confessing their marriage to his traditionalist parents after several years in the dark. Undaunted, he turns to the Buddhists for answers.
Nadeem's journey toward self-enlightenment and actualization becomes the centerpiece of the film - a frequently hilarious but also thoughtful and provocative journey into the depths of one man's soul and his quest to tell the truth - not only to his mater and paterfamilias, but to himself and even to us, as the audience. There are marvelous surprises to be had along the way, especially the moving, tender friendship that blossoms onscreen between Nadeem and a young Japanese apprentice monk who works in a monastery gift shop... A friendship that will change each man's life in unforeseeable and indelible ways.
Nadeem has cited Ross McElwee (Sherman's March) as a key influence. But it's more distinct than anything McElwee has created - and actually reaches further... Distinguished by the the depth and profundity of its gaze and the loftiness of its thematic reach. It also benefits from spectacular location photography of the Japanese mountains and a taut narrative structure that keeps us guessing on the outcome of the director's quest - right up til the final sequence. Nadeem worked on this project for years, investing enormous amounts of time, thought, care and revelation into every frame... And it shows. This is a truly unique and special picture. Don't miss it.