I caught The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm on TCM, presented in the 2022 David Strohmeier restoration in Smilebox, which provides a weird digital simulacrum of the original Cinerama experience of nearly 150 degree immersion amid three screens. As Cinerama was a brief blip in movie history, with only two narrative movies to its credit (How the West Was Won, along with WWBG), and insanely demanding and expensive to restore the film elements and recreate the projection, the original…
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Misty 1961
MISTY (1961): I’m prepping for a mini-vacation to Chincoteague and therefore felt the need to check out the film of the book that made the island famous. I really like that it was filmed on location before the full tourist-mania hit and that it utilized locals in its cast. It makes it a nice time capsule! Unfortunately, director James B. Clark isn’t up to the task of making a good movie. The two lead kids (including David Ladd, who I…
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A Woman Under the Influence 1974
A Woman Under the Influence (1974): There's a three-act structure in play here even though it’s an original screenplay. Having just watched Virginia Woolf, it reminded me of that, but looser, with extended actor improv sequences in place of Woolf’s more literary sparring. I thought Peter Falk was pretty great and worked well with a talented supporting cast, but I didn’t really take to Gena Rowlands. I’ve seen a lot of mental illness—both during years of work in MH/MR and…
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Coffy 1973
Coffy (1973): Today, most Blaxploitation feels like a 70s cop show with the violence and nudity dialed up to an R level. Coffy pushes hard at that ceiling. It works largely because Pam Grier is a force of nature; you can’t keep your eyes off her. There’s one part where I think the filmmakers ventured way over the line on the violence into bad taste, either intentionally or unintentionally recalling one of the most horrific crimes of the Civil Rights Movement years. Nevertheless, if you want to get a real taste of the Blaxploitation genre, this is a good place to start.
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