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Rehearsal for Murder (1982)
Where the curtain comes up on Terror
Filmmaker(s): David Greene

A year after his fiancée's death, a playwright schedules a rehearsal for his new play, which proves to be a trap for her killer.

Mixed Audiences I love this stuff. What happens here: a playwright has his wife murdered. He assembles the suspects to read a new play, and this play concerns events that implicate each of them. Each of these suspects is placed under increasing pressure by what he...


Published December 6, 2022
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Three Crowns of the Sailor (1982)
A voyage on the sea of dreams
Filmmaker(s): Raúl Ruiz

Shortly after murdering his professor, a young man encounters a sailor who offers him a position on his ship in exchange for 3 Danish crowns and his attention as he recounts his life story.

Writing with Tea on Oranges is just about perfect for what it is, and what it is elevates it to something that can change you. Life is a matter of stories and also about reflection on self. So all true stories are in some way at...


Published December 9, 2024
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Blade Runner (1982)
Man has made his match...now it's his problem.
Filmmaker(s): Ridley Scott

In the smog-choked dystopian Los Angeles of 2019, blade runner Rick Deckard is called out of retirement to terminate a quartet of replicants who have escaped to Earth seeking their creator for a way to extend their short life spans.

Offworld Truth the mid-seventies, I exchanged a few letters with Phil Dick, who had then dropped his obsession with parallel, valid visions and had developed a similar obsession with created realities. This concern maps well to the wave of film theory that was sweeping the...


Published December 9, 2024
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Fitzcarraldo (1982)
Dare to dream the impossible.
Filmmaker(s): Werner Herzog

Fitzcarraldo is a dreamer who plans to build an opera house in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, so, in order to finance his project, he embarks on an epic adventure to collect rubber, a very profitable product, in a remote and unexplored region of the rainforest.

Constrained Frenzy invention of modern drama was the birth of twins, and they have been spatting ever since. One of these is the Shakespearean tradition: characters transform, sometimes even extending beyond the constraints of the movie to create themselves or some reality. Situations are complex,...


Published January 6, 2025
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Aunt Peg’s Fulfillment (1981)
Shocking...Daring...Erotic
Filmmaker(s): Anthony Spinelli

The continuing lustful sexual adventures of Hollywood producer Aunt Peg as she tries to continue with financing her latest movie project.

Unfulfilling porn, the kind celebrated in “Boogie Nights,” cannot be avoided if you are serious about studying film. An amazing number of these, mostly from the 70s, have pretty cleverly engineered contexts. It is completely different than the porn of today, where there is no attempt...


Published December 24, 2022
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Beau-père (1981)
Filmmaker(s): Bertrand Blier

Rémi is a man trapped in a deteriorating marriage. When his wife is unexpectedly killed in a car accident, Rémi is left with his stepdaughter, Marion, who chooses to stay with him rather than live with her birth father. After the initial shock passes, Rémi is caught off-guard when Marion begins expressing her attraction to him. Initially repulsed, Marion's mature beauty wears him down as he finally caves to her seductions.

Music as Sex "Lolita" is a milestone in literature -- the narrator is obsessed to the point where anything he says is at least synthesised out of that obsession and at worse fabricated. It is only about sex in so far as giving a focus...


Published May 16, 2023
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Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (1981)
Filmmaker(s): Emir Kusturica

A young man grows up in Sarajevo in the 1960s, under the shadow of his good, but ailing father, and gets attracted by the world of small-time criminals.

The Lost First Time is something of a challenge for me to parse. The experience is a bit troubling because it seems so genuine that we should be ashamed for intruding. He does not seem to accomplish this by ordinary means. Yes, the acting is...


Published February 10, 2024
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The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981)
She was lost from the moment she saw him.
Filmmaker(s): Karel Reisz

In this story-within-a-story, Anna is an actress starring opposite Mike in a period piece about the forbidden love between their respective characters, Sarah and Charles. Both actors are involved in serious relationships, but the passionate nature of the script leads to an off-camera love affair as well. While attempting to maintain their composure and professionalism, Anna and Mike struggle to come to terms with their infidelity.

Narrative Folding environments, two of the century's greatest film actors, one of the half-dozen or so best modern playwrights and Fowles' experiment in parallel narratives. Fowles' work was pale compared to Nabokov's "Pale Fire," for instance in building a convoluted, layered narrative, but is comparable...


Published December 9, 2024
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The Stunt Man (1980)
"If God could do the tricks that we can do, he'd be a happy man..."
Filmmaker(s): Richard Rush

A fugitive stumbles onto a movie set just when they need a new stunt man, takes the job as a way to hide out and falls for the leading lady while facing off with his manipulative director.

Citizen Crane are quite a few movies like this, films that reference films and that also aver that the drama within can bend the reality without. The kernel of this idea was ‘Citizen Kane’ but it seemed to flower after John Fowles published ‘The Magus'...


Published May 22, 2022
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