New York comedian Alvy Singer falls in love with the ditsy Annie Hall.
The Story about the Story is an intelligent man who worries about the issues of film-making. The primary concern, the very first problem, is always to decide what the relationships are among the audience, the camera, the narrator if any, and the characters. Woody was on...
A bookish CIA researcher finds all his co-workers dead, and must outwit those responsible until he figures out who he can really trust.
Books, Binding Pollack recently died, and I dredged this up to watch. It is a strange relic of a time when we really liked these spy stories — and the stories were allowed to be simple. The characters had no life outside the confined story....
Alice offends her would-be lover William by rejecting his advances. Upset, she falls asleep reading Alice in Wonderland. The white rabbit appears to her in a dream and takes her into a sexual wonderland. The story loosely follows Carroll's original plot, and includes many of his characters, but with considerable sexual license.
Mock Turtle appears in scores of films, and many of the appearances are subliminal. I’ve made a hobby of collecting all the references and looking to see how cleverly they exploit the story. As it happens, there is a natural fit between Alice and sex,...
Bored and restless, Alice spends much of her time lusting after Jim, a local sawmill worker. When not lusting after him, Alice fills the hours with such pursuits as writing her name on a mirror with vaginal secretions and wandering the fields with her underwear around her ankles. And, in true teenaged tradition, she spends a lot of time writing in her diary.
Another Alice blunt and clumsy, this film transports one — especially a male — to a place never visited. That's in part because of the unflinching honesty of the narrative stance; never wavering from the girl’s perspective. It it were more familiar territory, like Jane...
Maria, an unfortunate young woman, kills her rapist father in self-defense, and is later tried, sentenced, and shipped off to a woman's penitentiary where she and her fellow inmates are subjected to psychological and sexual abuse at the hands of a psychotic lesbian warden.
Captured been involved in a dangerous business, diving into the catacombs of film, digging around in trash pits and seeing grand things. Part of this endeavour comes from my appreciation for the vitality of film today which in large part is anchored by Spanish and Spanish-speaking...
Internationally-renowned photographer Mae Jordan, professionally known as 'Emanuelle', is hired by a wealthy British expat to go to Nairobi to shoot the ruins and wildlife. While there, she explores sexual situations with her hosts and their friends.
Math Porn is a pretty interesting twist on the by then settled formula. The Emanuelle formula is: lots of nudity, with the women being trim, suggesting innocence. shot as softcore with two or three hardcore inserts, so that multiple versions can be marketed. the women are portrayed as in...
A quiet and inconspicuous man rents an apartment in Paris where he finds himself drawn into a rabbit hole of dangerous paranoia.
Front Window a pretty old dude, old enough to remember the taste of Oreos and Coke as they were 50-55 years ago, when every taste for a kid was fresh. I wish I have somehow set some aside then is some magical suspended locker, so...
A young woman who is determined to maintain her independence finds herself at odds with her family who wants her to tame her wild side and get married.
Transucent Space, Layered Face a life in film brings an experience like this. Its oddly tense in some dimensions and relaxed in others and the balance between the two seems distinctly Australian. I hadn't seen this when it was new, and I'm glad. Seeing a...
A passionate telling of the story of Sada Abe, a woman whose affair with her master led to an obsessive and ultimately destructive sexual relationship.
Pudendal Space Japanese notion of space is highly developed: abstract but visceral, refined but applicable to a daily, graceful life. That notion, and the philosophy of beauty through balance ('katachi') is what makes the Japanese sense of architecture worth incorporating into one's life. Many good...
Lionel Twain invites the world's five greatest detectives to a 'dinner and murder'. Included are a blind butler, a deaf-mute maid, screams, spinning rooms, secret passages, false identities and more plot turns and twists than are decently allowed.
Simple Mind Games mystery is like no other narrative device because it challenges the viewer to a duel. You the viewer or reader are invited to outguess the detective character, the crook and even the writer. But since the created world depends on the writer,...