From: annie@garnet.berkeley.edu  (Anne Jessop)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies
Subject: Re: The Weird List
Date: 7 Jan 1993 19:48:58 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: garnet.berkeley.edu
Originator: annie@garnet.berkeley.edu




Hi, thought of a few more for the ol' list:

_Parents_: (Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt as kitschy cannibalistic fifties
parents to a deeply troubled kid.  Great study/spoof of cold war paranoia.)

_Until the End of the World_: (William Hurt, Solveig Dommartin, Max Von
Sydow, Jeanne Moreau; a lot of people disliked this three hour-plus long
film, which rambles and is pretty hard to follow the first time you watch
it.  I thought it was beautiful, though.  Whether you like it or not,
definitely kinda wierd.  *Great* soundtrack.)

_The Devils_: (Oliver Reed, Vanessa (I think) Redgrave; A Ken Russell film
about some nuns (I'm not sure of the period, it's been a long time since
I've seen it, but it's definitely set in the way-back-there-past.) who,
led by their love-crazed abbess (Redgrave) accuse a priest (Reed) of
consorting with the devil and raping and possessing them all.  Lots of
overacting and scenery chewing.)

_Aria_: (lots of famous actors, directors; Opera goes MTV.  Several well
known directors (Russell, Nic Roeg, Truffaut(?), others, direct their
conceptions of arias.  There's a cool Liebestod set in Las Vegas, and an
funny spouse-swapping tale with Buck Henry at the Madonna Inn in
California, but not much else.)

_Insignificance_: (Theresa Russell, Tony Curtis, Gary Busey; dir. Nic
Roeg; Wierd movie about what might happen if Marilyn Monroe holed up in a
hotel room with Albert Einstein, and Joe DiMaggio and Joe McCarthy crashed
the party.  Probably the best Theresa Russell has done.)

_Track 29_: (another T.Russell/Roeg effort (they're married in real life),
with Christopher Lloyd, Sandra Bernhart and Gary Oldman.  Sorry, this does
not work at all.  But it is wierd.  Self-consciously wierd.  Russell is
neglected, bored, possibly insane young wife to
Christopher Lloyd, a dentist (I think) who can only get aroused if his
nurse (Bernhart) spanks him to train soundtracks.He ends up dead. 
( I've probably seen everything T.Russell ever did because I dated her
younger brother, who was obsessed with her, for four years.  Pretty much
all her stuff with Roeg is self-consciously arty/wierd.  Most of the rest
of her work is just plain bad.)

Some clarification of my recommendation of Basket Case I-III, since they
are definitely not uniformly good.  I is a classic about separated Siamese
twin brothers, one of whom is a human-eating blob of flesh.  II was made
about ten years later and picks up with them on the run from the the law
and holing up at a sort of halfway house/safe house for exploited
"freaks."  It's okay, but definitely campy. (Could have been better
without the Freddy-Kruegeresque puns and with make up that would have made
the freaks look more "realistic" and less like something from the bar
scene in Star Wars.)  III is like II but more so.  The worst of the three.)

_Sisters_ (Margot Kidder in a terrible french-canadian accent, dir. by
Brian DePalma; is another fairly good movie playing on the
"separated-at-birth-and-one's-a-psycho" theme.  Has some of that cheesy
split-screen stuff he was playing around with in _Carrie_ and _Dressed to
Kill._)

More later, maybe.

--annie


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