My homemade video clip for the Joseph Losey film The Servant now has half a million hits at my Youtube site. Maybe you didn’t know I have a Youtube site but now you do. Please check it out. I have over 200 uploads there but I do not really do much in the way of posting bulletins or responding to comments. Sorry.  Lot of effort to maintain it via proxies from China where Youtube is blocked. But I was happy to get a little notice from the gents at Youtube along with some weird offer to make money off of the clip with Google Adsense. I am not interested in that at all and am saddened to see some sites I love now plastered with Google ads and Amazon.com stuff. No doubt I would slap a big ad on my site if it paid off in big bucks but I don’t think that will happen so I will not litter it with Adsense or Amazon stuff. Anyway, instead of making some offer to be a ‘partner’ with Adsense I would prefer if Youtube stopped blocking videos and sending me nerve-racking warnings because a nipple pops out of a fat girl’s blouse in a 60’s  exploitation trailer or because Bettie Page gets spanked, tied up, gagged  and thrown in a car trunk. Regardless I am happy this video is so popular but I disagree with some of the comments that slam Sara Miles. I love her.  She’s hot in that real snobby way. Like I would need some sort of freaky shoe fetish to get anything going with her at all. That will never happen but let an old man dream okay. My link to the original post is here and it is a great film I have seen several times and will maybe re-watch again here shortly. I am of course including the award winning video here. The quality is pretty poor I see now and I could probably do it better these days since I am monkeying with the more advanced Sony Vegas 8. This meager experiment was done using ULead 10 and Windows Movie Maker and I remember having lots of problems as it was my first experiment in making clips from videos.  For nostalgia’s sake watch at the very end and there is a little advertisement clip promoting my website way back when the URL was different.  History in the making my dear readers.

SARA MILES AND JAMES FOX GET DOWN AS ONLY

THE REPRESSIVE 60′s BRITISH MIDDLE CLASS CAN

IN JOSEPH LOSEY’S THE SERVANT

PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!

1962/Director: Ray Milland/Writers: John Morton, Jay Simms

Cast: Ray Milland, Jean Hagen, Frankie Avalon, Mary Mitchel, Joan Freeman, Richard Bakalyan, Rex Holman

I know I’ve really liked a movie when later I am replaying the film in my head. Sometimes I imagine myself in the film and what I would have done in certain situations. Usually I handle these situations much better than the film’s original characters did of course. Or I may imagine myself overseeing a remake of the film that, while employing modern technologies, remains true to the original concept. Such is the case with the Ray Milland well directed low-budget doomsday film Panic in Year Zero! Certainly there are flaws to the film if you want to sit back and pick it apart but over all the film works well as a cold war period vision of how an everyday suburban family out for a weekend of tranquil fishing and camping has to deal with the sudden reality of a nuclear war in their backyard.

The capable actor Milland, even in schlocky fare like Frogs or The Thing with Two Heads, handles the directing chores well here. The film is a 1962 AIP low budget feature and it could have fared worse. But Milland’s pacing moves the story along with out it ever getting too bogged down. It does get bogged down of course here and there but I feel that is more an issue with the film’s budget than with its direction or acting. All of the devastation is alluded to and we never see any of the brutal horrors of the devastation an atomic bomb being dropped on LA would cause. Milland plays honest, hardworking everyday citizen Harry Baldwin who is heading out for some fishing in the Sierras with his family. His wife Ann (Jean Hagen) rouses their two grumpy teenagers, Karen and Rick (played by a pre-beach party Frankie Avalon) up at the crack of dawn to get the trip under way. In no time the action begins as LA lights up behind them and they stand in disbelief as the hugest mushroom cloud ever forms over what was once Los Angeles.

MORE PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! HERE >>

At times the nation of China, where I have lived now for five years, seems to be nothing but a nation of impassioned bystanders. People who just do not want to be involved in other people’s matters. If it does not affect you or your family directly it is something to ignore or gaze upon, hands folded behind your back, in remote curiosity. There can be a sense of helplessness on the part of a person who in dire straits here. They can be not only over looked by their fellow citizens but by the police, community leaders, doctors and most certainly by strangers who seem to see others only as opportunities. If you serve no purpose for them such as some quick money) they will not waste any time on you. This not a statement about 100% of the population of course. But in Li Yangs second film, Blind Mountain, one of the recurring themes is the indifference of just about everybody involved in the plight of college girl Bai Xue Mei who is kidnapped then illegally sold as a wife and baby machine to a villager and his family living in the remote mountains of Sha’anxi Province. Many people in the story could have rescued her if they simply did something.

Li Yang is like Ye Che’s Diao Yinan and is one of the new 6th Generation of Chinese film directors. Their films are less polished and extravagant than the directors before them like Zhang Yimou. Working with smaller budgets and often funded from outside China their films push the strict censor boards and sometimes do not even play on the mainland. Blind Mountain was released the same year as Night Train (Ye Che) and played along side at certain foreign film festivals such as the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. While visually the country sides of Blind Mountain are more beautiful to behold than the gray, industrial skylines of Ye Che the story itself is as, or more, bleak and painful to experience than Ye Che. In rural villages in China preference is given to male children for all the reasons one would expect in a farming based culture. Female babies are commonly murdered after birth (with legal impunity for the most part). People here usually do not have recourse to such things as sonograms and if they did the daughters would no doubt be aborted before birth. As it is they are discarded, as the film depicts, like garbage later and the couple gets back to work on trying to bare a boy immediately. A disproportionate number of males therefore exist in rural communities where education is none existent and thinking is backwards. The idea of buying a wife, like people have done for centuries, seems the most natural thing to the families in these isolated communities. Now this is not always a legal issue and some rural women are sold by their parents longing to get rid of the burden of a daughter to families to want to get their sons to breeding a new generation of boys. Some rural women see this as what a woman has done to her in life. There are no other options. And while buying wives is illegal in China it is another matter to try and enforce these laws as the film makes clear.

MORE OF LI YANG’S BLIND MOUNTAIN HERE >>

Ye Che (Night Train)

2007/Director: Yi Nan Diao/Writer: Yi Nan Diao
Cast: Rongcai Fu, Chao Ji, Dan Liu, Shudi Liu

In case you stumbled onto this site for the first or are a visitor who may not know it I live and work in China. I want to make that little information clear from the start since the film I am writing about in this post, 2007’s Ye Che (Night Train), is one of the more brutally accurate glimpses into life in modern China I have seen in a Chinese film since coming here. Most of the films being produced here are these atrociously boring historical epics that I cannot sit through. Those films seem to be trying to follow the path set by Li Ang’s great heroic epic Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon that won the 2003 best foreign film Oscar award. Almost everything coming out of the mainland now is some sort of epic set in the Tang or Qin dynasties and have a feel of the old Hong Kong ‘wu xi pian’ (basically kung fu films) that are not only safe as far as the Chinese censors go but might just, all the directors hope, win another Oscar. There are other films that come out of the mainland but I never really see any of them. Stupid comedies and propaganda films that show how evil the Japanese were and still are or how glorious was the founding of modern communist China back in the days of Mao Zi Dong and his little gang. Most of the new films from the mainland are lackluster and vapid. But that is not to say that there are not original and gifted film makers on the mainland whose visions run contrary to the efficient propaganda machine here. It just means their films are often financed and shown outside of the country and the versions shown here are censored and edited to death. As was the case with the Blind Mountain (Mang Shan), released the same year as Night Train. Blind Mountain tell the anguished story of a college girl in modern China who is drugged and kidnapped and held prisoner in a remote mountain village and forced to bear a child for a village man and his family. She is assaulted and beaten by the family and villagers routinely. It is a reality that this happens in modern 21^st century China still but that is not the type of film the government here want to promote. A review of Blind Mountain may be around the corner.

MORE OF YE CHE (NIGHT TRAIN), INCLUDING VIDEO SAMPLES, HERE >>

HEAVENLY CREATURES

1994/Director: Peter Jackson/Writers: Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson

Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Kate Winslet, Sarah Peirse, Diana Kent, Clive Merrison, Simon O’Connor, Jed Brophy

On June 22, 1954 the peaceful little port city of Christchurch, New Zealand was shaken to the core by the murder of one Honora Rieper in idyllic Victoria Park. The horror only grew when diary entries by Honora’s daughter Pauline Parker (Pauline used her mother’s maiden name during the subsequent trial since Honora and Herbert Rieper had never actually married, though it proved to be a minor issue scandal wise) led police to arrest her and her friend Juliet Hulme for murder. The trial and its press coverage was something of a phenomenon for the citizens of New Zealand who had not had much excitement since Sir Edmund Hillary scaled Mt. Everest a year before. The papers were rife with conjecture concerning the relationship between the two girls. Did the girls share some type of insanity? Were they lesbian lovers? That may seem trivial now, or it may not, but in 50’s New Zealand homosexuality was an indication of a severe mental disorder as well as criminal behavior. The real life Juliet Hulme, who went on to live in Scotland and write mystery novels under the name Anne Perry, has denied there was ever a lesbian relationship between herself and Pauline, who now resides in England under the name Hilary Nathan and, as a Roamn Catholic convert, devotes her life to helping handicapped children. One thing for certain was that the girls had formed over a period of a couple years  deep bound that they were not about to split apart by the decisions of their families without resistance.

Peter Jackson had gained a reputation up to this point for making splatter horror/comedy films such as Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Braindead (Dead Alive). The movies were pretty good low budget fare that have all gone to genuine cult status but were hardly the sort of thing that would attract mainstream attention or approval. He was approached by friend and writer Fran Walsh with the concept of turning the Parker-Hulme murder story into a motion picture. Walsh had long been fascinated with the story and hoped to give the story a fact based retelling. The story had actually loosely been told before in the 1971 French film Mais Ne Nous Délivrez Pas Du Mal (Don’t Deliver Us From Evil) and while there are elements of the story in this interesting film there are lots of liberties as well, the most obvious being the story is set in France. I do recommend Don’t Deliver Us From Evil as a decent movie however. I had the fortunate opportunity of seeing Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures at the small and cozy Grande Illusions Cinema in Seattle. I knew the name Peter Jackson at the time from his horror/fantasy work and still connect it to the alien vomit drinking scene in Bad Taste. I was not sure what to expect. I was more than happy with the film and Jackson’s decision to move away from slapstick-gore films (though if he wanted to return once in awhile that would be okay too).

MORE HEAVENLY CREATURES HERE >>

Here is a homemade clip  of the opening sequence from Star 80 highlighting Eric Robert’s performance as the slimy but lethal Paul Snider. I uploaded it to Google Video and I hope it stays since there are not many clips or decent trailers to be found online for this film.  There  are no trailers to be found on Youtube or Google Video at all, at least not that I could find and for certain reasons I was anxious to upload this clip to Youtube right now.  I got my 1st ever warning at my Video Cavalcade site there for uploading a trailer to the Japanese  sex/gore flick Killer Pussy (and you can follow that link to my review and Google Video clip at Necrotic Cinema). Since this scene has some nudity and naughty words I did not want to upset the censor committee  at Youtube there and get my site removed. If I can find a good trailer online and download it I will get it back up somewhere and post it here at the Cafe. For now enjoy this homemade clip from Star 80.

STAR 80

1983/ Director: Bob Fosse/ Writers: Teresa Carpenter (article), Bob Fosse (screenplay)

Cast: Mariel Hemingway, Eric Roberts, Cliff Robertson, Carroll Baker, Roger Rees, David Clennon, Josh Mostel, Lisa Gordon

Star 80 is the 1983 film by Bob Fosse that deals graphically and unflinchingly with the rise of Playboy Playmate of the year Dorothy Stratten to modest fame and her brutal murder by her controlling and fame obsessed husband Paul Snider. The film is done in a type of documentary style with actors playing the significant people in Dorothy’s life adding hindsight to the event. We know what the ending of the film will be and Fosse takes us directly right to the bloody scene itself in and then retells the story in various flashbacks and narrations. While perhaps not Fosse’s best movie it is a well shot and edited film that has actually been criticized for dealing with the subject matter in such a glossy and stylish manner. It is significant for Fosse as well in that it is the last film this great director ever directed. He went on to work in other areas of film making and production. This it too bad really as this is the same skilled director who also gave movie goers Lenny and All That Jazz.

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