AP: "Movie theaters cut print show times as Web gains"

WWW--You think they'll take ads for unrated movies now? I mean it, really. Who's laughing now? Me, and all the indie filmmakers the newspapers have screwed over the years. Good riddance, die already, will yah?

Kansas City-based AMC helped shine a spotlight on the trend last month when it pulled its listings from The Washington Post, prompting the newspaper's ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, to deflect readers' ire in his blog.

"Most readers believe that it was the newspaper's decision," Alexander wrote, comparing it to The Post's recent move to cut back on the newspaper's television listings. "In fact, movie listings in the print product are paid advertising, and it was AMC's decision to stop paying."

The Post declined further comment, and Alexander wrote in his column that the newspaper wouldn't tell him either how much revenue the AMC ads provided.

AMC spokesman Justin Scott said daily movie listings are expensive and the theater chain believes that that money would be better spent promoting its value programs or other theater events.

"In an era when many moviegoers are using alternative resources to access show times, AMC has chosen to reallocate its show-time information methods," Scott said.

Scott wouldn't say where else AMC has cut its listings and how much it has saved. But he said "so far we've seen no impact on attendance."

Regal, based in Knoxville, Tenn., said its in-theater and online surveys found 60 percent to 80 percent of respondents saying they received their movie listings online. ("Movie theaters cut print show times as Web gains," AP, 08.22.2009)

And you, Hollywood: there's something called the Internet. You can't keep people from watching independent cinema like you used to, not anymore. People can and do watch movies on iPods, laptops, and their own home cinemas. Soon, very soon, most people will be able to download what they want to watch and bypass what they don't want to watch.

DVDs have opened-up most of the history of cinema to young people and many of them know where the movies have been and what's possible. When they look at the usual Hollywood fare, they're unimpressed, unmoved by it, because it generally sucks. The party's over, welcome to that brave new world you boors knew was always coming, a viewing public with considerably more savvy. Let's be honest: that was always the case, but you had a captive audience. That's over.

You used the newspapers to keep foreign film and indie cinema from competing at all; you got legislation passed that subsidized your bottom-line, shut-out the smaller distributors, and got you subsidized advertising in foreign markets. People are tired of most of your product, they want more. Eventually, you're going to have to deliver or go away, like the rest of the corporate monoliths that are toppling right now. With the rapid death of the newspapers, media conglomerates are going to keep taking major-hits. This can only be a good thing. Does consolidation sound so good now? All fall down.

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/tec?guid=20090821/4a8e29d0_3421_13345200908211073774666

Hollywood must die (soon come!): "Dahmer vs. Gacy (2010)

Hollywoodland--In our new economy, you just have to roll with the punches, kicks-to-the-genitals, and all the other body-blows that the consolidated mainstream media are going to ignore, therefore, making it go away.

But this was a new one on me: there is a movie in production with the aforementioned title, Dahmer vs. Gacy, no B.S.

In our new "Big Top communities" (tent cities--GOP elephants too!), we'll all be able to watch (speak for yourself) bootlegged DVDs of this movie that will surely make Ed Wood smile from his little nook in Hell.

At first I considered that this was one of the famous and most recent rulings (like her great ruling in Freddy vs. Jason several years ago, along with Alien vs. Predator) by Supreme Court nominee, Federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor, believe me when I write this. After all, our justice system is telling us that they can detect a crime before it happens when someone's Middle Eastern, but that didn't fit...or did it?

Calling Dr. Alex Jones! And so, as we move ahead into uncharted history, these rulings will be crucial in determining whether we should have Sotomayor as a Supreme Court Justice--well, that and whether she's menstruating or being human in another way and tripping and fracturing her ankle. I know, a bourgeois hoot!

Ken Russell at the BBC Box Slated for Sept. 23rd

Film--This is great news for true lovers of cinema everywhere. These were documentaries done by Ken Russell during the 1960s for BBC television. Most are around an hour, some longer, and either focus on some great artist or composer. More than a few of these films were made for significantly less than a million English pounds.

The set is composed of 3 DVDs (NTSC), clocking-in at 477 minutes. As far as I can tell, they're all black & white, and full screen format as they were broadcast. I own the Isadora Duncan film in 16mm print form, and it looks absolutely luminous.

Expect very surprising quality: the television prints are very fine- grain, and on AGFA safety film ("no vinegar)"! "Dance of the Seven Veils" was Russell's final BBC film--he was booted-out after that, not to return until 1992's "Lady Chatterly," and only because it was through BBC-Birmingham. Sometimes, you have to bypass the head office, and the memory at the BBC is a very long one indeed.

The big surprise of the set is that it has a "suppressed" film. Just a few-years-back, "Dance of the Seven Veils" was banned by the Strauss estate from being shown at a Belgian film festival. The reasons were obvious from the film's content: Russell paints the waltz composer Richard Strauss for what he was--an ardent Nazi supporter (though this is arguable), and one of Hitler's most famous admirers outside of Leni Riefenstahl. Russell argues throughout the majority of his biopic documentaries (even his studio ones) that, yes, these were incredibly flawed individuals, but that their artistic works redeem them. This release is sorely overdue.

The tentative film list:

The Debussy Film, Dante's Inferno (w. Oliver Reed!!), Always on Sunday, Isadora: The Biggest Dancer in the World, A Song of Summer, Dance of the Seven Veils

Ken Russell Extravaganza!

"I have two more breakthrough films on the stocks – Porn-Again Christian and A Chink in the Curtains. Each one lasts just one minute, including credits." --Ken Russell, December 14th, 2007.

Russellmania--That wonderful enfant terrible of cinema has been writing an often hilarious and always thoughtful column for The Times. Ken Russell also has a new film entitled 'A Kitten for Hitler,' and it's free, online for all you deadbeats: http://www.comedybox.tv/index.aspx . Ken gives a bit of a synopsis at Comedy Box when he states that:

This story concerns Lenny, a naive little Jewish boy from Brooklyn, who reasons that Hitler wouldn’t be so bad if he were treated like a human being instead of a monster. Accordingly, he risks life and limb to cross war-torn Europe to deliver to "Uncle Adolf" a placatory Christmas present in the shape of a cuddly kitten [Ed.-I think we should try this with the president, don't you?]. Moved to tears, the Führer hands him a swastika-shaped bagel from the Christmas tree, whereupon Lenny pulls up his shirt, revealing an almost identical birthmark. What happens next I leave to your imagination– likewise the moving payoff.

Here's to extremely bad taste done on-the-cheap!And this is just one of a few other films of Ken's that are available, free, and online to all you cheap bastards out there.

Ken's newest article at The Times (UK): http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article3074343.ece

FOR NATO: Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò (1975) review

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain. ---The Marquis de Sade

So you say you've seen nearly every major Italian giallo? You've seen your Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, Michele Soavi, and even all of the "classics" of Italian film? You've seen your Leone, Fellini, DeSicca, Bertolucci, Martino, and even most of the world classics? By this point, you've probably seen it all, and you think there's no film that will shock you?

If you haven't seen Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salo: 120 Days of Sodom," you are flatly wrong. Pasolini didn't even live to see the release of this film. He was "murdered" by a male hustler (or so the official story plays).

Who was Pier Paolo Pasolini? Pasolini was the most important postwar intellectual in Italy, period. Like a Renaissance polymath, he was adept at journalism, the novel, poetry, screenwriting, directing motion-pictures, painting and drawing, and more. The polymath also liked cruising teenage boys, was a walking scandal, and yet paradoxically truly was the conscience of postwar Italy until his murder on November 2nd, 1975. He could only be an irritant in the culture he arose in, and he pricked the conscience of a nation. It's likely that he engineered his own murder, placing its date on the day of the dead as a frame...

Pasolini's revolutionary philosophy was simultaneously opposed to fascism and communism, and he had many enemies in the political arena, as well as the religious one with the Vatican. All said, however, it's possible that Pier Pasolini was murdered by a right wing assassination team under the aegis of "GLADIO," a NATO program of secret armies throughout Western Europe. GLADIO began, ostensibly, as a defense against a hypothetical Soviet invasion of Europe.

Overall, GLADIO was more often used to attack legitimate leftist political parties, trade unions, and populist groups. GLADIO operations were responsible for breaking the Marseilles dock strikes in the late 1940s as just one example of their handiwork. Their activities in Italy during the Cold War are known to be extensive. Italy is a flashpoint, a fixed, coordinate in the nexus of control of the Western power structure.

In Italy, the Red Brigade bombings in the 1970s were even instigated by GLADIO operatives to justify a law and order crackdown on the Italian Communist Party who were poised to take power at that time. It's a mystery as to how much influence the CIA had in all of this. The existence of the P-2 conspiracy (oddly, involving the Vatican, the CIA, KGB, and renegade Freemasons!) had yet to break in the international media. All this aside, there were dozens of politically motivated killings in 1970s Italy, and Pasolini's was just one of many.

One has to ponder the Vatican's involvement in his murder, as they were a primary adversary of Pasolini. And so, Salo enters this bloody fray. It could not be more controversial, and it's a scream of rage against how little we all really care about or value human life. Pasolini was outraged and disappointed with the human condition, and Italian politics had become a bloody chaos, leading director Sergio Leone to remark at the time that, "Italian politics have become ridiculous." Both directors were friends.

The scenario of Salo is fairly simple: a group of Italian fascists retreat to a palace in Northern Italy (where there was a great deal of support for Italian fascism and the Monarch) with a group of sixteen captive boys and girls. One is a bishop, a judge, a politician, and-so-on, representing symbols of established authority. It is Mussolini's short-lived Republic of Salo, created especially for him by the disintegrating Nazi regime. Hence, "Salo" is a title that almost any Italian of the 1970s (or today) might recognize. For 120 days, they degrade their victims in almost every imaginable--and unimaginable--manner.

There is homosexual rape, sundry forms of buggery, forcing people to eat excrement, forced heterosexual couplings, forced marriage, sadism of every kind, and finally, death. Just about everything you could imagine occurs, and worse. Of course, it's all based loosely on De Sade's tale and stays pretty close to the text's themes and scenarios.

Pasolini chapters each section with some of the structure of Dante's "Inferno," which is a real mark of his genius. One can even sense an atavistic Manichean influence in the work, which isn't surprising: Friuli has been historically known as an ancient citadel on the Northern "boot" of Italy, where the ideas of the world hating sect are still evident in the local culture. Pasolini's home state, Friuli, has been thought of as a place of subversion for centuries.

The Italian polymath understood that, under the right circumstances, we are all capable of these depredations. This is a lesson that he and others learned during the resistance to Italian and German fascism in Italy during WWII. Pasolini witnessed and experienced injustices committed by the partisans, losing his own brother to a firing squad.

There's a little Hitler in everyone, and we all the potential to become assassins under the proper conditions. Beyond that, To say this film is merely a statement on fascism would be wrong--it's a manifesto on what cruelty rests within all human hearts, especially once one has supped on power. In Salo and his other works in other mediums, Pasolini is saying that humanity has a dark heart and that nothing is really true.

This was the point that "Italy's conscience" had reached artistically by 1975, though his existential crisis regarding the future of humanity had begun much earlier. Salo was always lurking there in Pasolini's mind, waiting for its time to emerge. Some online reviewers have stated that they didn't find the film shocking--they should check themselves into a clinic somewhere, as Salo is beyond shocking. But it should be remembered that De Sade was only writing about the sexual habits of his kind--the aristocracy before the French Revolution of 1789. De Sade wasn't simply trying to shock. He was chronicling the sexual tastes and behaviors of the French aristocracy before the revolution.

I've noticed that even avid fans of contemporary directors such as Takashi Miike respect the power of this film. Miike has some similarities in theme and style with Pasolini, but goes for a more genre, stylized look (it's not the heady 1970s anymore). Even John Waters lists this film as sicker than his own worst offenders. It could be argued that Desperate Living (1977) is an oblique spoof of Salo. To say I was shocked by this film would be an understatement. But, besides being pretty sick, this film looks astonishingly lush and challenges the audience by shoving the beautiful and the grotesque in our faces. This is another aspect of Pasolini's genius of showing us depredations in such a lovely setting.

Salo transcends the subversive and never fails to shock. The late Tonnino della Colli's cinematography lends the film a look that could be hung in the Louvre, and it gives the film a greater subversive edge overall. Several of the shot compositions resemble well-known works of Western art. Della Colli was director of photography for Fellini, Sergio Leone, and many other classic Italian directors. It should be noted that the film is not "legitimately available" in the United State for copyright reasons. However, there are very good copies out there even though it's not in print. I found a copy that's an exact duplicate of the original US edition for a decent price, so it is out there to be found with a little searching.

The Criterion edition is reportedly the most expensive collector's DVD in the world, going for as much as $1,000.00 USD. [Ed., 08.31.2008--Which is now probably devalued with the new Criterion edition.] This was the best transfer in 1998, but it appears that there is a new continental European DVD purported to be definitive, as well as a BFI edition that's unexceptional. This writer possesses a few Ken Russell DVDs ("Salome's Last Dance") that are worth as much as $300.00 USD, so this is a shocker! It's funny to see used DVDs of the big Hollywood fare at $3.99 USD, while these are in the hundreds! It says a lot about what is lasting and meaningful to people, and it's not blockbuster movies.

A dubious company called "Water Bearer" has a set of Pasolini's other works, but I have it on good word that they are of extremely poor quality and aren't restored and come from aging 35mm prints. It would be nice if Criterion did a Pasolini Box that included a new HD transfer of "Salo" with extensive restoration. Salo is one of the most important films ever made. We all stand accused, even the filmmaker, and that's the point. Be forewarned: not for children or adults who fear soul-searing, raw existentialism. So, why? Why would anyone want to watch this? 

NOTE: The "ass-judging-scene" is similar to photos of the "flesh pyramid" at Abu-Ghraib. The new Criterion edition will bring a fresh reassessment of this Italian masterpiece, with only the omission of one extraneous 25 second scene. It will be HD from the best film elements. Brace yourselves.

(Revised 07.06.2008)

[Ed., 10.05.2008--I see no reason why Pasolini couldn't have been murdered by various rightist elements, while at the same time having brought it about purposefully. Why not?]

Ken Russell's Whore (1991, Unrated version) review

The comments over the years on this film are both amusing and frustrating, and I just hope Mr. Russell has read a few of them, as it would probably tickle him to-no-end. Come on, people: this is the real deal here, and these are most of the realities of prostitution. It isn't pretty or glamorous, is it? How much value is attached to the life of a prostitute?

Ask the King County sheriff's Department and the Seattle Police Department--they allowed the Green River killer to run riot for 20+ years thanks to their own rampant hatred and bigotry towards prostitutes. That hatred also exists throughout our culture and in the minds and attitudes of many Americans.

 

This is a pure film for Ken Russell, and a compassionate statement for the victims of prostitution, namely, the whores. Legalization is (wisely) advocated, and we even treated to a few of the arguments for it (from a pimp-character himself) and what some of the drawbacks would be: no bribes for the dirty cops and politicians, no control by pimps and politicians (the same thing) of these women over their own bodies, proper regulation of sexually-transmitted diseases, and-so-on. In other words, there are numerous elements of our society who benefit from the status quo of prostitution. But what other reasons for keeping prostitution illegal are there? The emancipation of the victims. This doesn't support the current social order, therefore...
It would also mean the prostitutes would get the biggest-cut, which is anathema to these bastards. If prostitutes controlled the business as many of them did before the early-20th century, they would be very powerful women indeed, and a social force to be reckoned with. They would be revolutionaries. Sex is a nexus of control as well as a doorway to liberation. At one time, so-called "madams" were some of the greatest benefactors to charities and progressive social movements. Legalization of prostitution is a key towards emancipation of its victims, offering needed regulation of STDs, as well as a previously untapped flow of tax-revenues that would be dramatic.

Currently, several developed nations are going in this direction, but the USA prefers sticking with policies that the Saudi Royal Family would approve of. Leave the whores alone, just ensure that they have health care, are taxed like everyone else, and aren't vulnerable to murder anymore. It seems that that's asking too much, so demands are going to have to be made eventually. There are other reasons why prostitution is illegal...
 
One should remember that it was rich women in America who got the profession criminalized--partly to stop their rich husbands from frequenting them. Not that it ever worked--they're still doing it anyway, even as I write this. Prostitution is illegal for means of social control, period. Ever notice how the rich and powerful are obsessed by what the "other-half" does in the bedroom? Puritans are the most sexually-obsessed people there are. Watch this film, and you will understand that Mr. Russell is a genuine Christian with a heart. After all, Jesus consorted with such people, didn't he? They need our help and our compassion, which is the main theme of this film.
 
Ken Russell appears to enjoy the inherent bawdiness of the material-at-hand, or he wouldn't be Ken Russell, would he? The dialog itself is a dream, and David Mamet's plays/screenplays would be a good analogy, very hardcore and street level. This is because the dialog came from real prostitutes and their stories, almost making this a social document of when it was made, and it will surely still be relevant so long as it's a crime in this nation or any nation. As a matter of fact, the original play it was based on was written by a former lady of the night.

While some have commented on the low-budget look of the film, I don't think that this is accurate. It compositions look slick and well-conceived for maximum impact, and cinematography-wise it's simply gorgeous. Many of the scenes are shot in a color-coded style for various characters and scenarios, and it works well as it did in Russell's "Crimes of Passion" (1984). The reasons for these opinions come from the fact that no new format versions have been produced, and so we're left with shoddy-transfers from VHS and Laserdisc copies from the early-1990s.

All that aside, Theresa Russell (no relation to the writer/director) is astonishing in her portrayal of a woman trapped in "the life," she wants out desperately, and it's more than she ever bargained for. This is anthropologically correct. Like Kathleen Turner, Russell is easily one of the greatest actresses of her generation, and she proves it in this role as Turner did in "Crimes." She shows us the sorrow of prostitution, while simultaneously projecting her sexuality as an actor, which is a real trick. 
 
If you enjoyed Crimes of Passion nearly as much as I did (I consider it a masterpiece), this will be a wonderful companion-film for you, dear viewers. You either love or hate Ken Russell, and he has always been my favorite form of a high-stress personality endurance test. Most tend to fail this test, but it takes all kinds, doesn't it? Russell's genius in this film is using the iconography of our sexualized culture (including crass imagery from advertising), and throws it in our face showing the ugliness and emptiness behind the commodification of sex and our bodies.

This is a real accomplishment considering how great the film looks and its stress on stylization and an interesting aestheticizing of sexual imagery pack a potent punch. Nonetheless, Russell succeeds here, and the ultimate lessons on prostitution are significantly different from the hollow Hollywood portrayal of the trade in "Pretty Woman" (1990). In fact, it's the obverse. "Whore's" grim portrayal brings us the core-truths of prostitution through style and composition on a classically-structured silver platter.

We are confronted with many of the reasons why women become prostitutes (from their perspective), why many can never escape it, and how many of them--because of their vocation--can never enjoy sex ever again. Once it hits DVD (sometime around the Apocalypse), it will finally be able to be reassessed properly, as some of Russell's canon has recently.

That it shines so brightly on my unrated VHS copy is a testament to its inherent brilliance, and to the genius of director Ken Russell. "Whore" contains a message to be heeded regarding the "world's oldest profession," and that's that sex has little to do with the motivations behind it.

Puritans, take heed: it shouldn't be a problem to say it. Give this man money to make another feature film! Ken recently discussed the making of Whore on the UK's version of Celebrity Big Brother, and he was a hit!

Revised 08.31.2008

Pasolini's Teorema (1968) review

I cannot get this man out of my system, our era's ephemeral Socrates. Pier Paolo Pasolini haunts the modern mind, reminding us of the terminal crisis (ironically brought on by the human desire for freedom), in this, our common era of human society. The Italy of his lifetime passed from a preindustrial to a modern state in less than one generation and it was a shock to the WWII generation of Italians who had previously been very provincial, isolated, and basically an agrarian nation of peasants.

This would be like taking American history from 1877-1920, when we became an industrialized nation, and cramming it into roughly 30 years. The effects on the culture could only be devastating and genocidal, as Pasolini astutely described the Americanization of the Italian peninsula. Other nations fared far worse under the effects of modernization: We know the results in Russia under Stalin with the tens-of-millions dead. But the damage to Italy during the "economic miracle" of the 1950s, and passing into the 1970s, was almost unique: traditional Italian culture was slipping-away, and changing into an empty, bourgeois consumerism. This mindless industrialized technological consumerism now spans the globe. Pasolini saw the writing on the wall: the bourgeois revolutions were culminating in the destruction of the natural environment and human civilization.

Like many authors, artists, and intellectuals of (t)his era, he was doing what most artists do, namely questioning the social order around him. Like Philip K. Dick and Werner Herzog, Pasolini was concerned that this reality we are now surrounded by would strip people of their humanity, their symbols, and of any authentic qualities and spirit, and that we cannot continue along such a path, that the end was near if we did. We would lose our myths and we would lose our souls. Today, the damage is pretty obvious with movies that say nothing, music that makes the listener feel nothing, television that only seems to lie to us more than ever, devouring our creativity and our souls...a runaway consumerism that is literally metabolizing nature and a scientific and economic order that continually tells us that there is no meaning to anything, no truth.

Global warming and an impending ecological catastrophe are the realities that these artists and intellectuals warned us all of during the Cold War, and some still are. Pasolini didn't wax-nostalgic for some sentimentalized remote past, but he saw things as getting worse and that an apocalyptic calamity was waiting at the end of it all. In 2007, this doesn't seem so far-fetched, but one should realize that the alarms were already being sounded over 40-years-ago. So little has changed. Into the bloody fray of 1968 politics and culture came Pasolini's "Teorema," or "theorem." There really isn't another film like it in any director's canon, yet he would top it with Salo at the end of his short life. The film begins with what appears to be a newsreel story taking place at the gates of a factory called "Paolo." Is it a strike? Why are all the workers there, milling-about? The journalist (probably Pasolini, off-camera) with the film crew asks them what's going on, and we find that the owner of the factory has given it to the workers, lock-stock-and-barrel. You'll never see a scene like this in any American movie. But most slaves want to remain slaves.

Pasolini goes on by taking a swipe at the Italian Communist Party (PCI), by having a worker dismissing the miracle as "part of a trend." (!) It's the end of the story, and a lesson on how the Left--and most all of modern humanity--had lost contact with the divine and the ability to recognize it in life and within each other. Much to his credit, Pasolini scandalized all. Barth David Schwarz's biography on Pier Paolo Pasolini "Pasolini Requiem" (1992) illuminates the film's premise:

People expected Pasolini to deliver a straightforward if scathing attack on the bourgeoisie and its lack of religion. His apparently simple premise, the "theorem" of the film's title, was that when one family was faced with a power that constituted real liberation (by necessity sexual) and their values were revealed as bankrupt, its members would spin into "madness."
(Schwarz, pg. 519. Pantheon, 1992)

And so, the story "begins" where it began, the home of the industrialist bourgeois--a Milanese "borghesa"--and his family, in this antiseptic villa that seems almost empty (of belief? of values?). As in life, the bourgeois characters reside in their own social space, alone, living in virtual solitude without meaning. There is the daughter, the wife, the son, and the devout peasant maid who dream of some kind of a release from their life, some transcendence. Be careful what you wish for.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, a kind of salvation announces its coming. A herald in the form of young Italian boy announces his arrival in a note to the maid. In time, the "stranger" (played by a 28-year-old Terence Stamp) appears, and quite abruptly without any explanation. Pasolini had this to say about the stranger in his film:

Originally, I had intended this visitor to be a fertility god, the typical god of preindustrial religion, the sun-god, the Biblical-god, God the Father. Naturally, when confronted with things as they were, I had to abandon my original idea and so I made Terence Stamp into a generically ultraterrestrial and metaphysical apparition: he could be the Devil, or a mixture of God and the Devil. The important thing is that he is something authentic and unstoppable. (ibid, pg. 521)

Inautheticity withers in the presence of truth. Like all the great tragedies of Greece and Rome, the family passively accepts his presence as a symbol of their fate. The stranger rarely speaks, but he brings every family member love and a direct contact with the divine through sex. He fills the void in their lives of isolation and emptiness. Again: be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

The maid (Laura Betti) is first: he rescues her from a suicide-attempt, and makes tender love to her. Shortly afterward, she leaves the villa and the bourgeois reality itself to return to her village. She begins a fast of contrition and eventually seems headed towards some kind of beatification or sainthood, even levitating at one point towards the latter-half of the film. Her fate is the best one, although that of the son points to the interior life of artists and the authentic everywhere, and he is the next to be seduced by the stranger. Then comes the daughter Odette (played by Godard's wife at the time), who appears in some respects to be the most sexually-fulfilled. The mother and father, finally, end the seduction. For a time, they all seem to have lost that feeling of "loneliness" and incompleteness that comes with modern life...and then the stranger leaves, just as abruptly as he came, a hallmark of the divine. With his absence comes the fall, and a reminder that the void never left, a stunning metaphor for the limits of sexual-release and escapism. No, the void in life never leaves, and is made all-the-more lonely after coitus.

The once sexually repressed mother (the sultry Silvana Mangano) becomes a nymphomaniac, and begins to seduce young men in the nearby city, repeatedly trying to recreate her experience with the stranger, but to no avail. The son becomes totally immersed in creativity and contemplation, showing the dissatisfaction and longings of the artist that can never truly be achieved. Like Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave," he can never touch the true forms (the stranger) ever again. His fate is preferable to the rest of the family since he appears to at least have an outlet for his obsession. The daughter Odette lapses into a comatose state that seems permanent. After an illness that's healed by the stranger, the father becomes a sexual deviant who exposes himself at a train station by film's end. Throughout the movie, we see images of a desolate, gray landscape shot at Mt. Etna. It's meant to reflect the inner-loneliness of the characters and ourselves. This dead landscape is the modern worl, the empty space in all of our lives, and what's waiting at the end of this social order. By the end of the film the father is seen running naked through this volcanic wasteland, finally letting-out an almost inhuman scream of existential despair. From this, you can tell that Pasolini actually felt sorry for most of the bourgeoisie, something that I don't share with him.

Teorema is available through Koch/Lorber video on DVD, and is perhaps one of the greatest films of the entire 1960s. It won a special award from the International Catholic Film Office at the Venice film festival that year, but elements within the Vatican had it withdrawn. The students in the Paris, Rome, and Berlin of 1968 adored the movie, yet Pasolini tended to heap scorn on many of them, calling them "bourgeois," and that the New Left's fight with the establishment in France and Italy was a "battle between the haves and the haves...an internecine struggle." Once again, he was correct. One can see and hear Salo (1975) coming in this film, a work that probably got Pasolin killed before his time in a field at Ostia, a place where human sacrifices were once held. Salo is a dark chocolate, while Teorema is a truffle, the appetizer before the meal.

Revised, 11.27.2009

The Birth of Pop: Ken Russell's "Lisztomania" (1975) review

To many, this film is the stunning proof that director Ken Russell never had it and that idiocy and egotism were mistaken for genius. You could say mistaking idiocy and egotism for genius has been the appeal of rock music all along!

Others might say that Russell is simply childish or immature, and that his films are the "masturbatory fantasies" of an overgrown-adolescent. This belief is unfounded. Consider this film part-autobiography and the problems faced by most artists who have to battle for control over the direction of their work with their backers, their "patrons." Before there was even a notion of "capitalism," artists have had to fight to protect their visions from the very people they're dependent on to realize those dreams.

Is this film over-indulgent? Yes it is, dear readers, very-much-so, because it is art and not entertainment. That said, if you chuck any expectations, this is also a funny film and allegory about the rise of pop culture in the 19th Century.

Russell's Lisztomania ( phrase coined while the composer was at the height of his powers) draws parallels between Liszt's fame and that other generally hollow spectacle known as "rock." That's not to say Russell dislikes Liszt's music or that he views it as meaningless--the contrary is true. What Russell hates is the empty spectacle. But this is great filmmaking, and it should be noted that it has similarities between itself and another film of the same year, "Rocky Horror," and even "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," as they examine and explore the relationships between sexuality and pop culture. It really is true that women threw their underwear at Franz Liszt during his performances and that he had many-many lovers, 19 th century "proto-groupies."

Lisztomania is also that very odd bridge between "classic" arena rock and the emergent punk movement of the time. The film can be seen as a statement that "rock" is not really subversive or rebellious at all, but ultimately arch-conservative and repressive. Amen. It's just a hilarious, wild romp that will make your guests extremely nervous, which films all great films should do. Movies should challenge people to think and reflect, at least occasionally.

Ironically (or perhaps not-at-all), Mr. Russell had previously contracted Malcolm MacLaren and Vivienne Westwood to design the S&M costumes for his film, "Mahler." It should also be noted that "Liszt-O-Mania" was released exactly the same year that MacLaren's shop "SEX" shop opened on King's Row; the rest is, as they say, history. It couldn't be more camp considering it has Little Nell in it, but it would be without her.

Basically put, this is about the the ins-and-outs of "why" we want and need pop culture and WHAT we generally want from our "pop idols" (sex and some form of wish-fulfillment, naturally). One could say this film criticizes the absurd spectacle that rock had become by 1975, and this theme pops-up often throughout the film, but Russell was never a fan. No, this psychological comic book portrait goes much deeper into the relationship between artist and patron. Nowadays, the patrons are the mass audience, something that was just emerging from the industrial and commercial age. Once, it was just the aristocracy, now the mob has been added.

Sexuality is about mass psychology, so Wilhelm Reich gets-his-due here in some areas, and there is a plethora of Freudian imagery, which is something you expect from Russell. Lisztomania is certainly a very personal film for the director and probably amuses him as much as it does myself that it enrages so many critics (definitely a "get-screwed" message to all of them), but it should be noted that some of the absurdity and excess came from the producer of the film, not Mr. Russell. The enfant terrible director has complained about the opening country song in his autobiography "Altered States," and that there were other aspects of the production he didn't want in the film. Perhaps. Yet Russell tends to enrage all the right people, and that's what at least some film-making should be.

God love this lapsed Catholic, and God love his ways. Lisztomania is a flawed part of his canon, but a very watchable and educational one. As Russell began his career doing documentaries and impressionistic films on composers for the BBC, it makes a kind of sense that this is considered one of his most heretical works since it goes well beyond his work for television in the 1960s...until one becomes aware of his banned "Dance of the Seven Veils" about Richard Strauss.

Critics of the film tend to trot out the BBC documentaries as a yardstick, yet this isn't so far removed from "Dance of the Seven Veils," a film that also utilized the same psychosexual comic book approach of Strauss's and Hitler's fateful relationship. Liszt and Wagner's fateful relationship is portrayed in similar terms and imagery, namely that of National Socialism. Dance of the SevenVeils got him booted from the BBC for nearly twenty years. It's hard to generalize about Russell's career, except perhaps on a thematic level, but he's always willing to rile.

It's interesting to note that the 1980s was the period of his purest work, due mainly to a three-picture deal with the now-defunct Vestron pictures. But the standard view of many of his sharpest critics is that it was a fallow decade. The opposite is true.

The 1970s were actually a very mixed-bag for Russell, as evinced by Lisztomania and Valentino, and he continued to struggle for artistic control over his films as the decade rolled-on. He isn't entirely pleased with Lisztomania, but Russell definitely had some fun with the material, and so, there it is. This is hardly one of his best films and surely not his worst. What it is is a real laugh riot. I think it's a hoot, which means it isn't on DVD.

Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) review

Ken Russell is a director you either hate or love--I'm with the latter, and enjoy irritating the same targets Russell does, endlessly. The simple fact that many of Ken Russell's films are hated makes me love them all-the-more. This is arguably his best film, and his only political one.

As a period-piece, this film is stylized, but looks very convincing, and the cinematography by Dick Bush and set designs by late-and-great Derek Jarman (another genius of film) are stellar.

Consider why films like this one aren't made often, and you may have part of the answer as to why this film is still so shocking. Many people dislike Russell's films because of what he reveals about all of us, but that's too bad. People didn't like what Auschwitz said about humanity, but there it is, forever.

Apparently, Warner Brothers has finally-decided to release this film as a director's-cut in 2006, or 2007 [Ed.--2008 and still waiting...]. It is being reported that all footage removed by the BBFC and American censors (mainly at Warners) in 1971 will be reinstated in an "unrated cut" approved by the director. Some very good prints have been circulating around Los Angeles, New York City, and London recently...

The film "The Devils" may have been taken from the Aldous Huxley book, and the 1960s play by John Whiting, but it's squarely Ken Russell's film from-beginning-to-end.

Also likely to be included on a future DVD is the excellent BBC documentary by Mark Kermode ("Hell on Earth"), about the making of the film, and the firestorm it created. The "renegade" DVD by Angelfire is acceptable, and will have to tide us over until then, but there is one by "Trash Palace" that looks even better (though minus the inclusion in the feature film of the deleted scenes). Both the Angelfire version and the Trash Palace edition has the aforementioned Kermode documentary, and a widescreen transfer (1.85:1, the wrong aspect-ratio, the film was lensed in Panavision at 2.35:1) of the film. Only the Angelfire version contains the "Rape of Christ" scene reinstated.

This was a film that Warner Brothers hated after the executives saw the final cut in a studio screening. The Warner pressbook itself even states that it was going to be a hard-sell, with posters marketing the film as horror. It is horrific, but really constitutes a political allegory. Some of the posters warned potential audiences that it was a film "most people won't like"! It did reasonably good business, but wasn't a hit, though it could be assumed that the studio made their money back.

In a film that bombards the viewer with violence, decay, plague, and death, it isn't surprising that people miss some of the film's thematic points: The Devils comments on the eternal threat to individual rights and spiritual liberty from irrationality, social hysteria, and authoritarianism, and that they're often played-out in the same ways in different eras. You can see this in the comparisons made between Oliver Reed's character Father Grandier, and that of the accepted Christology of 17th century France (orthodoxy being represented by the characters of Father Mignon, Sister Jeanne and Cardinal Richelieu--an unholy trilogy?).

Is there much difference in why Grandier is degraded similarly to Christ? Russell (a Catholic)goes radically further: is there any difference between the political scapegoating of Urbain Grandier and Jesus of Nazareth? What's truly degraded is the Gospel of Christ and St. Francis. "The crowd" appears to be swayed in either direction, with a tendency towards hysteria and authoritarianism, making for a grim message indeed. But, this is generally what happened to Loudon, its inhabitants, Grandier, and France, at the time of the story.

Russell tells us that Richelieu's yearnings for theocratic power can only be seen as a threat to liberty, just as they are now in the Middle East and the United States. Russell seems to be saying that these political and spiritual struggles are one-and-the-same, and that they require an eternal vigilance against them. This is not an exploitation film, but it is as dark and horrific as any classic tale of horror. What's most horrifying is that it's true.

Keep-in-mind that not one image is in this film "by mistake," as Russell composes his framing for a specific meaning and purpose just as the old masters did. This film is a warning against the aims of power, and shines a ray of artistic truth on why Christ was crucified to boot. There are numerous tableaux that could have come from Goya or Bosch.

The images of people being tortured, vomiting, acting hysterically--they are not there to merely to shock, but as a warning about social hysterias that have a tendency to recur throughout human history. Repression can lead to greater perversions and tyranny, states Russell, and resoundingly. Set specifically in 17th Century France after the eight Hugenot Wars, "The Devils" should be read as a cautionary tale on how people willingly give-up their liberties during uncertain times...times not unlike our own.

The religious and cultural wars still rage on, and will continue to for the foreseeable future.

Why a restoration is necessary: a long-overdue reassessment will come with the world finally being able see what director Ken Russell intended. World culture might see this film being very influential (it already is), and not just in spawning exploitation fare. Italian genre filmmakers were inspired by this film when they began churning-out "nunsploitation" cinema! Good lapsed Catholics, all, I can assure you. This is what the "Grand Guignol" was based-on, the real deal. From the 1600s-to-now, the threats are essentially the same. Only the technology has changed.

Bother Warner Bros. into releasing this classic at: www.warnerbros.com