Change Your Image
bookbeat-1
Reviews
MC5: Kick Out the Jams (1999)
High NRG psychedelic ZENTA montage
This film is a 30 minute collage of vintage historic MC5 footage taken by band photographer and documentary artist Leni Sinclair. Some of the earliest known footage dates from 1966, perhaps earlier. There are shots from the infamous Grande Ballroom, the Detroit "Love-in" on Belle Isle, and outdoor summer free concerts in Ann Arbor. It is filled with live concert recordings that try to match the visuals -- but are not always "in-sync" - there's a bonus track with MC5 manager John Sinclair recorded at "Jim's Wimpy Burgers" an Ann Arbor landmark greasy-spoon. Sinclair recollects the first meeting and early days with the MC5. It's an honest presentation of the MC5 at the beginning and early heights of their short but influential career. It shows an ongoing effort to convey the psychedelic elements and light-show effects of the day. It is one of the few "approved" projects by all members and estates of the MC5, and well worth viewing for fans of the Detroit high-energy rock scene.
Flaming Creatures (1963)
MASTERPIECE OF FLAMING CINEMA
FLAMING CREATURES is the bedrock of all underground cinema. Even if it was only a title without a film, it would stand as a masterpiece!
Jack Smith is the exotic gilded director of mouldy dreams...
his value is rising daily as a shinning star above the junk-heap of no-good commercial film-making.
We genuflect at the altar of his magnificent glowing cinematic masterpiece... scotch-taped together with glitter and
rhinestone studded splices. Where have all the brave film-makers gone?-- No one but Jack has had the balls to change our awareness-- FLAMING CREATURES has the atomic structure
of a new reality and consciousness.
Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977)
TWISTED BLACK ARTS FAIRY TALE - RECOMMENDED
Watching "Death Bed: The Bed That Eats" is like waking up in the hospital, two days into a suicide
watch, disorienting but oddly stimulating. There are few cinematic equivalents to this disturbing yet often humorous lesson in mythology, morality and surrealist ideology.
Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet" and Maya Deren's
experimental works evoke a taste of the strange atmosphere found in DEATH BED. A close comparison are the dark adult fairy-tales by literary genius- author Angela Carter, the short disturbing stories of Unica
Zurn or E.T.A. Hoffman.
DEATH BED has many recognizable elements of the
past, but displays a wholly unique and original storyline.
As a story, DEATH BED is an amazingly simple yet original
vision, something which only one-in-a-thousand independent releases will manage to accomplish. This unassuming film has its technical flaws but overcomes them all with a cast of beautiful non-actors
and lost creepy locations- a true 1970s independent classic.
DEATH BED also displays a unique, subversive, 3-dimensional personality-- a deep and continuous layering of dream images and ideas that lend it a "fun-house" type of construct. The passage of time told in flashbacks and historic time travelogues, the bed with its sinister black humor, the rich yet understated symbolism used within its imagery. Most pleasing is the image of Aubrey Beardsly, the suffering artist, forever trapped inside the frame of his own painting as he comments on and fondles with the murdered victim "offerings" gifted to him as love offerings by the demented bed's spirit. -- A sick refrain and wonderful element /metaphor for the "trapped artist" -- Nothing but the weirdest in POE or MALLARME can equal that.
Anyone who values the spirit of independent cinema and craves the multi-layered symbolist experience, or craves the Surrealist concept of "convulsive
beauty" and the Gothic-horror leanings of low budget exploitation film-making will dig this totally unique vision. A simple and fun film with deliciously deep psychic undercurrents. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. *****
Aelita (1924)
Aelita as missing-link to Metropolis
Although it gets billed as a front for Soviet propaganda, this film seems to be outstanding in relationship to the time it was made and its phenomenal use of set design and production values. As just a piece of visual decoration it stands as a far advanced
futuristic film in comparison to that hot-pants junker
METROPOLIS -- which owes a deeper, (or at least equal) debt to
Russian constructivist design then to its German Expressionist
roots. AELITA is one of the most seductive and rich films in silent
cinema --if you can get past the storyline and plot development--
which should never interrupt WATCHING a film.