Burl reviews Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched! (2021)

 

From deep within the creaky fen I cry “Ha ha!” Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a new documentary picture, which provides many things, not excluding a kaleidoscope of movie clips, a long list of films to watch, a great huge gallery of gabby movie nerds, and a sore bum, because the thing is well over three hours long! Ha ha! It’s a study of folk horror on film and television, and it’s called Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched!

The picture is divided into chapters: six of them, to be precise! We open with a look at British folk horror, which is a smart decision because while it’s not the fount from which all other folk horror has sprung, it’s likely the most common entry point into the genre for most viewers! Ha ha, we’ve all seen Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man, and Blood on Satan’s Claw, and so those three pictures, which interviewees refer to as the Unholy Trilogy, are tackled first, and this leads into a section on British TV horror of the 1970s, very little of which I’ve seen!

From here we spread out into other regions: North America, Asia, the Down Under areas, so forth! There’s a bit on the Icelandic picture Tilbury, ha ha, and Rawhead Rex, and mentions of the Indian Burial Ground nonsense featured in movies like The Shining and Pet Sematary, and the goofiness of this in underlined by one of the interviewees, Jesse Wente, who points out that when you’re disinterring legend on Turtle Island, remember that it’s all an Indigenous burial ground! Other interviewees include the director of The Lighthouse and, more relevantly, The Witch, Robert Eggers, and Alice Lowe, co-writer and co-star of Sightseers!

The doc goes on (and on, and on!), exploring the early works of folk horror, which are of necessity not that ancient themselves, as it takes time for story to become myth! The fifth chapter is titled something like “Folk Horror Around the World,” and it’s here that the movie becomes less of a documentary and more of an essay film, which is not in itself a bad thing, but doesn’t feel completely purposeful! Indeed, the fifth chapter is by far the longest, and one really starts to feel the running time here! But the earlier chapters, more concise and skillfully organized, at least give this one a solid foundation upon which to overextend itself!

Many clever people are interviewed, and they make many clever and worthwhile and illuminating points! Ha ha, I learned a lot! But the interviewees are frequently allowed to digress, and often these digressions are of interest, but at other times they just seem to extend things more than is necessary! And, as seems unavoidable with the weight of all this material and diverse historical knowledge, the picture eventually goes beyond its remit and includes movies that I myself would call folk horror only by the broadest and most generous of definitions!

Still, it’s not my movie, is it! And the impression one walks away with (after one has regained feeling in the buttocks and properly emptied the bladder) is that the sheer amount of effort put into this picture is stunning and very much to be admired! Like most great catalogue works, there’s a feeling of inevitability about it, and necessity, and it’s-about-time, but also the strange impression that this study has already been done, that the scholarship has previously been lassoed into just this form - that, ha ha, we’ve seen this movie before! And of course it hasn’t and we haven't, but that sense too is a testament to the project: an indicator that it badly needed doing and has indeed been done right! There’s a lot to discover here, and so I recommend catching the movie whenever you have the opportunity! For both ambition and achievement, I give Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched three wizard sticks!

Burl reviews Volcano! (1976)

Ha ha: Burl here with a dash of reality for you! Yes, it’s a documentary, one I saw years ago and recently revisited! It’s called Volcano, but the full title is, I think, Volcano: An Inquiry Into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry! Ha ha, that’s a mouthful! But as I recall the title card on the movie itself is simply Volcano, so that’s what I’ll go with, even though some may confuse it with Volcano from 1997! That would require a good deal of confusion, and cause even more!

Because this Volcano is an almost experimental Canadian documentary about Malcolm Lowry and his great creation, and possibly my all-time favourite novel, Under the Volcano! Boy oh boy, I read the Penguin edition of that thing when I was twenty years old, and I was by golly hooked! I return to it regularly, in fact, that same battered copy! Ha ha!

The documentary, which came along seven or eight years before the John Huston adaptation of the book, with a great drunkard act from Albert Finney as the Consul, uses interviews and location footage, and one curious courtroom re-creation scene, to give a full biography of Lowry from cradle to grave, packed with every detail you might want to know and several you might not! The portrait is of a tormented genius; a desperate, devoted inebriate; a disordered emotional state and crippling lack of self-confidence! It’s not a pretty picture, but if you’ve read Under the Volcano, it’s precisely what you’d expect!

Lowry, born into comfort in England, leaves this behind to become a cabin boy on the high seas, and then, after some schooling, writes his first book, Ultramarine! Ha ha, the movie doesn’t mention this, but my understanding is that, en route to a publisher, the young author left his only manuscript in a cab, which then drove away, and he had to rewrite the entire book from scratch! Soon after that Lowry was married, and spent some harrowing time in New York where his copious mental health problems erupted into full bloom, and he ended up in Bellevue! Next he went to Mexico, where he began work on the manuscript that would become Under the Volcano, and where his wife called it quits on their troubled marriage! He married again and moved to a small shack outside Vancouver, where the book was finished, rejected by every publisher there is, and then rewritten and, after eight years, finished again!

The rest of the tale contains both triumph and tragedy, and many atmospheric shots of the Mexican volcano Popocatépetl! On the soundtrack we have plentiful narration from director Donald Brittain (who also gave us Sweetheart: The Hal C. Banks Story), a lot of Lowry readings from Under the Volcano or from letters, voiced perfectly by Richard Burton from Exorcist II: The Heretic, and an eerie avant-garde music score by Alain Clavier! Many of the interviews, and the interviewees themselves, are horribly fascinating, and are just the type of eccentric old Brits that I’ve met quite a few of myself!

On the debit side, the picture is quite definitively just a bit too long: removing just a few volcano shots and other Mexican material might have helped! And it seems to revel a bit too much in the harshest aspects of Lowry’s life! But these are very minor complaints: I find Lowry fascinating, his book spellbinding, and Volcano an exceedingly worthwhile account of both! Ha ha, I give it three and a half unnecessary photos of syphilis victims!

Burl reviews Camera 32 27th! (199?)

Hello and welcome, it’s Burl here to review… well, not a movie exactly, but an unusual and unique VHS tape that I found lurking in my collection! The video in question has no title card, but there is a label on the tape reading Camera 32 27^th, so that’s what I’m taking as the presentation’s proper name!

Ha ha, here’s the backstory to this… unusual tape! Some years ago I was invited by an acquaintance to help out his friend, whose parents owned a skid row pawn shop, by taking all their VHS tapes off the shop’s hands! They were free, but the catch was I had to take them all, not just the ones I wanted! Well, that was no real problem, and I ended up with a hockey bag and many, many cardboard boxes filled with VHS tapes of all kinds! This haul netted me gems like Action U.S.A. along with many others!

And buried in there was Camera 32 27^th! Yes, ha ha, I wondered about it, forgot about it, unearthed it, and then, finally, down in my basement VHS room, I watched it! Well, it turns out to be a tape made by, I presume, the employees of the pawn shop, and judging by the technology and fashions on display, I’d date it to sometime in the mid-1990s!

And what did they film, these amateur outsider cinema artists? Ha ha, backsides! Yes, they seem to have trained their camera on the behinds of every female customer who dared enter their den of iniquity! It’s quite creepy, and the occasional voice you can hear, for example a low murmur asking the cameraman “You got dat ass?,” or else a short Beavis and Butthead laugh, only sharpens the feeling of being party to something unsavory and wrong!

After a few seconds of flickering images showing different angles of the front and side doors of the place (evidently this was a repurposed security camera tape), the video proper begins as it means to go on: with a close-up shot of some unsuspecting young woman’s caboose! There are a few inelegant zooms in and out, and random reframings, and then we go on to the next victim!

The buttocks-obsessed cameraman will frequently drop to the floor to find the camera angle he desires, or when needs be he’ll go hand held! It’s a camera of the id, true first-person cinema, and we can almost read the shooter’s mind as he focuses on what is clearly the object of his every waking thought! And at another point we sense the peep artist’s frustration at one young lady whose bum is unsportingly hidden by her purse!

The perpetrators of this voyeuristic outrage worked as a pair, with one of them running the camera and the other occasionally coming out in front, casually pretending to browse, then at the right moment turning to make humping motions at the ass of whatever poor woman these cretins are filming! Mercifully, both filmmakers mostly remain behind the camera, ha ha! But all of this goes on for about fifteen or twenty minutes, and a dozen or so bums, then it's back to the cycling doorway security cam footage for several more hours until the tape is done!

It’s a shameful, leering catalogue of Peeping Tom-ism, more morally reprehensible than even Getting it On!, but as a record of this particular time and place, and of these particular jerks, it’s unbeatable! If one is able to temporarily forget the invasion of privacy aspect and take it as a Yoko Ono-esque experimental work, all the better for your peace of mind! This sort of found objet d'art is really something that goes beyond any one reviewer’s rating system, but I’ll just go ahead and give Camera 32 27^th one and a half pairs of lifeguard shorts!

Burl reviews Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group! (2017)

Ha ha, and ticket stub please! Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a documentary about a regional film club called the Winnipeg Film Group, which I recently happened to catch on the Kroger Channel! I like these local movie and moviemaking tales - the last such picture I reviewed was probably 2014’s Out of Print, the documentary about the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles!

This one is called Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group, which is a riff on the title of the first feature by one of the Group’s most famous acolytes, Guy Maddin! That picture was called Tales from the Gimli Hospital, and if you haven’t seen it, ha ha, I recommend it! In fact I recommend all of Maddin’s work, particularly a picture called Careful!

Maddin is one of many interviewees in this talking-heads doc: he speaks of playing many hours of ping pong at the film club’s offices, and of his creative debt to fellow film club member John Paizs, the camera-cranker who made a very amusing picture called Crime Wave! Paizs himself is not interviewed for some reason, but much footage from his films, Maddin’s films, and the cinematic efforts of many, many others are excerpted! Ha ha!

There is also some footage of many of the moviemakers at work, using all manner of fascinating techniques to produce their films! There are vintage photos from the club’s early days in the mid-70s, so, ha ha, we get some good outfits and facial hair! The fact that it was largely a bastion of white male enterprise is addressed, and we see that the club has lately expanded its membership to include ladies, people of colour, the queer, and even some Indigenous folk! Better late than never, I suppose!

Of course it all takes place in Winnipeg, that famously remote and chilly city on the plains! It seems an interesting place, and in fact I know it is, having spent some time there myself! Their film club is among the most famous and accomplished in the land, ha ha, so on that basis alone, this documentary production is of interest! Those who are fans of the great Canadian films of the 1970s, from Goin’ Down the Road and Black Christmas, to Between Friends and Rip-Off, to Homer and Paperback Hero, will find themselves hooked!

There are plenty of tangents taken and amusing stories told in the course of the movie, but the unfortunate thing is that this film about filmmaking rarely sings as a filmmaking exercise itself! The editing seems too frequently arbitrary - you can see where the filmmakers have inserted shots simply because they need something there! Ha ha, the wallpapering is at times pretty egregious! And there are far too many literal gags: if someone mentions fire, we see a shot of fire! If the floor is mentioned, there’s a shot of the floor! Ha ha, having so many miles of other people’s films to choose from was perhaps not the advantage the makers of this doc supposed it was!

So at times one wishes this was better made, but mostly the subject matter is compelling enough to make you forget that! I’m glad the picture was made, and would hope to see other such histories from other cities! I give Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group two and a half jumping cats!

Burl reviews The Movie Orgy! (1968)

Hello and ha ha, it’s Burl here to review movie madness! Yes, I’ve recently watched Joe Dante’s first film, The Movie Orgy, which he made a full ten years before Piranha, back when he was a student and still wanted to be a comic artist! I guess The Movie Orgy represents Dante’s swing from comics into pictures, and as such I suppose it has historical value to those of us who appreciate the man’s work, even though one waits in vain for a clip with Dick Miller in it! But Dante's a fine director and, ha ha, you all know how I feel about Matinee!

But what is The Movie Orgy? Well, it’s a long pastiche of movies - mostly B pictures -  and television snippets, all cobbled together into a four-and-a-half hour beast that you can easily imagine the aliens from Explorers watching on their space TVs! A few pictures seem to occupy more real estate than others: Dante has distilled the likes of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, College Confidential (an Albert Zugsmith joint, natch, featuring Elisha Cook Jr. as The Angry Dad), The Giant Claw (the turkey gobbler from outer space, as big as a battleship) and something called Speed Crazy into just the good parts, and woven them all together like stripes on a mackintosh!

Laced into these are bits from other movies, like Teenagers from Outer Space, the 1933 King Kong, Beginning of the End, Moby Dick, and The Giant Gila Monster! We get many olde-tyme television moments too, like an episode of You Bet Your Life in which Groucho enacts something I’ll call The Humiliation of John Farbotnik! Other TV gold includes Andy Devine’s demented kids’ show Andy’s Gang, featuring good old Froggy; a clip of Elvis singing Hound Dog to a big basset in a top hat; US Treasury Bond appeals asking you to Underwrite Your Country’s Might; Nixon’s Checkers speech; and a series of insane Bufferin ads best described as inconclusive mini-dramas about “sensitive people” who care so much about others they need an extra edge to their headache medicine! Ha ha!

There are plenty of clever little editing room goof-offs, like a bit that starts with the opening title to The Naked City, followed by a short silent vignette from the 1920s involving a young inventor who has created a strange viewerscope upon which he can call up images of a topless ladies! Of course he is interrupted by his mother, which must be a familiar scenario to many of to-day’s computer-screen teenagers! Then we pop back to The Naked City, and the closing spiel: “There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them!”

We come away from The Movie Orgy with some fine quotes, like “That Skippy is too much for television!” from College Confidential, and the endlessly repeated “Everybody’s always crowdin’ me!” from Speed Crazy! There are lots of funny juxtapositions and a few editing tricks, and assorted monster movie, Western, and jungle picture clips, and lots of credits too, which I appreciated; and on top of all that the funniest Abbott and Costello skit ever: the Susquehanna Hat Company! Ha ha, great stuff!

The last reel jumps equally between 50 Foot Woman, Giant Claw, Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers and Giant Gila Monster, with other clips salted in to make an ironic point, or a joke, or an ironic joke, or no point at all! Finally there’s a bloom of The End cards, and people signing off or walking out or saying goodbye, and even Nixon claiming this would be his last press conference and you wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around any more! Cut to an audience clapping with enthusiastic approval, ha ha! And there are a few other good jokes at Nixon’s expense, and, looking forward, a couple of jabs at Ronald Reagan too! None of it's very slick - ha ha, you can practically hear the rattle of the Moviola and see the tape splices - but you can tell it was made with heart!

Dante, who created this college collage with his pal Jon Davison, remembers “great drifts of funny-smelling smoke” coming from the crowd wherever this was screened (mostly university halls), and it seems to me funny-smelling smoke is the right mindset to adopt for this experience! It’s got lots of easy jokes, sure, but it’s equally easy to forget that this would have been a lot of work to put together back in the actual-film days! Oh those glory days! The Movie Orgy is a pretty special creation, and I give it three Skippies who are too much for television!

Burl reviews It Came From Hollywood! (1982)

Well, can you even believe it! Here was I, Burl, visiting the Value Village with a few friends some weeks ago when I come across a VHS copy of It Came From Hollywood! Yes, that’s another one of those That’s Entertainment-style clipshows, like Terror in the Aisles or even Famous T&A; but this is one I remember watching more than once with my pals a way long time ago!

What I don’t remember is why we’d have watched this more than once! Ha ha, I guess it was the plentiful clips and the comedy guest stars! Yes, instead of, say, spookmeisters like Donald Pleasance, Cameron Mitchell or Elvira, here we have a bevy of chortlesmiths, including Dan “The Great Outdoors” Aykroyd, John “The Silent Partner” Candy, Gilda “Haunted Honeymoon” Radner, and Cheech and Chong, the well-known stoners from After Hours! These entities appear in weakly-written sketches, but save stronger material for their sardonic voiceover jibes! Some of these are funny, ha ha, but the sketches almost never are!

Oh sure, Gilda Radner plays her little girl character Emily for some of it, but as talented as she was, I never cared much for that little girl! (Still, Emily provides the best moment of the movie, a voiceover bit I thought was gutbustingly uproarious when I was young, and still think is pretty amusing!) Aykroyd does a bit that presages his role in Dragnet! And there’s a tender moment between Aykroyd and Candy during the Ed Wood tribute section! But, while I hate to sound overly critical, mostly these sketches just waste everybody’s time!

As for the clips, most of the usual suspects show up: Wood’s work, The Giant Claw, The Creeping Terror, Robot Monster, Reefer Madness! Ha ha, these are all bad pictures! But then we get The War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Creature From the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man and other fine pictures! What are these doing here? It’s kind of nice to see them, though – they’re little islands in a swampy sea of trash, which might without respite become unbearable before the picture’s 80 minute running time is up! So maybe that’s the purpose of including good movies in there, ha ha! I can’t quite say!

Anyway, it’s a clip show, pretty well edited and possibly the slickest of the 80s bunch of them! (Only Terror in the Aisles gives it a run there!) The inclusion of good movies is off-putting whatever the motive, and whatever the psycho-emotional dangers of not doing so! And, the natural charms of their enactors notwithstanding, those sketches are a heavy debit! Altogether I’m going to have to give It Came From Hollywood one and a half little pals!

Burl reviews That Guy Dick Miller! (2014)

Ha ha, hello! Yes, it’s Burl, and I’m here to review a documentary about my favourite actor, Mr. Dick Miller! It’s marvelous and amazing to me that such a movie even exists, so I do have to admit that, for me, this picture is starting with a distinct advantage right off the hop, and complete objectivity is nigh impossible!

On the other hand, I know quite a bit about Dick Miller, so any ninety-minute movie which attempts to present his life and career also operates at a disadvantage, since I’ll inevitably, and through no real fault of the film or its makers, think to myself “Ha ha, why didn’t they mention that fascinating aspect of Dick Miller’s life or career?” So maybe these two preconditions cancel one another out! Ha ha, it’s impossible to say, but caveat lector nonetheless!

As anyone reading these reviews will surely already know, Dick Miller was born in the Bronx in 1928, and spent many years trying out different careers before relocating to Hollywood in the early 1950s, where he eventually met Roger Corman and began acting in pictures like Apache Woman (his debut, in which he played both a cowboy and an Indian, ha ha) and Gunslinger and It Conquered the World and, of course, the mighty and unassailable A Bucket of Blood!

He eventually branched out from the Corman fold, though never very far! At a certain point he just figured his career was over, because Corman wasn’t directing movies anymore and Miller himself had become both middle-aged and thick about the middle! But, after a few fallow years, Miller was taken up by a group of younger directors who had long admired his work and were glad to give him a career renaissance! Joe Dante is the most closely linked to Miller (Piranha, Gremlins, Explorers, etc. etc. etc.!), but Jonathan Kaplan and Allan Arkush certainly did their bits too; and other Corman fans, people like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron and Quentin Tarantino, also hired him! Ha ha, he’s had quite a career!

That Guy Dick Miller covers all of this, and reasonably well! There are plenty of familiar and interesting faces interviewed, along with, of course, Dick Miller and his firecracker of a wife Lainie! Ha ha! The picture relies a little too heavily on jokey sound effects and kooky little animations, and the tone is breezier than I believe it should be! Ha ha, there’s something about telling a person’s life story that ought to invite at least a few moments of serious consideration, but this is for the most part hagiographic goofballitry, with but a precious few moments of introspection salted in!

Still, it’s all very well done, with terrific interviews, sharp cutting, some great archival material and plenty of well-chosen clips! And the subject matter simply can’t be beat! If I, Burl, would have taken a different approach, is that really something I should blame on the picture? Well, in my own review column, I suppose I can! But let me tell you this: whatever this movie’s petty deficiencies, it’s got more Dick than any movie since A Bucket of Blood, and that makes up for just about anything! I’m going to give That Guy Dick Miller three gag phone calls!

Burl reviews Edgar G. Ulmer – The Man Off-Screen! (2004)

Hi, Burl here, to review a documentary about a fine director of olden times, Edgar Ulmer! The movie is called Edgar G. Ulmer – The Man Off-Screen, and it purports to give us a portrait of the man behind such wonderful motion pictures as The Black Cat, Detour and of course Strange Illusion!

The picture certainly has a lot going for it! Ulmer’s daughter participates – she was one of the producers in fact, I believe – and has a lot of insight, of course! And then there’s a wide range of interviewees, like Joe “Matinee” Dante, or John “¡Three Amigos!” Landis, or Wim “Lightning Over Water” Wenders! These are engaging and intelligent fellows, and they have plenty to say about Ulmer from an informed film fan’s remove! Ann Savage, the star of both Ulmer’s Detour and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, shows up too, and gives a pretty good account of the making of Ulmer’s classic six-day wonder! The lead actor from Strange Illusion is also in there, and it’s great to see him too!

But the movie is hampered by various attempts at style which don’t really come off! Presumably inspired by the road movie ethos of Detour, many of the interviews take place in moving cars, which is hardly fatal, but is both distracting and a little misleading! It’s not as though Ulmer was so well known for his love of filming in cars or anything! You may as well film an Ingmar Bergman doc entirely in a car just because he made Wild Strawberries! Ha ha!

There are other location choices that are mildly off-putting, like the big Vienna Ferris wheel! Ha ha, I’m not saying that should only be used in a documentary about Carol Reed, but that should only be used in a documentary about Carol Reed! And there are two movie nerds who get interviewed in a Hollywood graveyard, and that doesn’t really work either! The bits with the car in the studio in front of a back projection don’t work they way they’re supposed to either – something about the way they’re shot totally fails to bring us back into that creaky Monogram studio in the mid-Forties the way it’s intended to! A noble idea, but the execution just doesn’t make it!

I don’t want to be too down on this documentary production, though! As I say, there are many interesting interviewees and fascinating facts! The filmmakers may have ended up with a bit of a dog’s breakfast style-wise, but at least they tried to mix it up a bit and go beyond the standard talking-heads-and-clips thing! And they deserve kudos for making a documentary on Ulmer at all, I say! And an extra bonus is that the DVD of this documentary includes an entire Ulmer picture, Isle of Forgotten Sins, as a bonus feature! Ha ha, look for a review of that one some time soon!

Well, maybe Edgar G. Ulmer – The Man Off-Screen didn’t rise quite to my exacting standards of documentary bio-pics about B movie directors, but there’s nevertheless much to admire here, not least the fact that it exists at all! I give this picture a hearty two Hollywood strip malls!

Burl reviews Marwencol! (2010)

Hi, Burl here with a movie review for you! It’s a documentary I’m reviewing for you today, ha ha, called Marwencol! It’s all about a fellow named Mark who lives in a small upstate New York town who, after a night out at the local p*b, is set upon by ruffians and bootstomped into practically another dimension! It’s pretty awful!

But Mark survives the attack, and pretty soon he has a new way of looking at the world! He creates a whole world of his own, a little town called Marwencol, made of miniature houses and populated by Ken and Barbie and GI Joe dolls that are named after people he knows, and who are enacting a perpetual Occupied Europe scenario! He, of course, is the hero!

But of course he still suffers in myriad ways from his attack! His mind seems to move a little more slowly, and he finds it hard to rom*nce ladies! But on the other hand, where he was a big drinker before, now he has no taste for alc*hol at all! The dramas of Marwencol have completely possessed him, and he takes picture after picture, dramatizing and documenting the goings-on there!

Of course, his project finally gets some notice when a photo-artist meets him and decides that Mark’s work must be seen! And he’s right, and Mark doesn’t disagree, even though his project was really only intended for himself! Eventually Mark, wearing his prettiest pair of shoes, is on the way to Greenwich Village, the very hub of the artistic world in America, for his first big show!

Marwencol is a grand documentary! The best kinds of course are those which continually surprise you with revelations, but never feel like they’re keeping revelations from you just so they can parse them out that way! This one is mostly – mostly! – like that! It’s best not to read too much about a movie like this before you watch it, and even in reading this review, you have probably read too much! It’s not a case of so-called “spoilers,” or anything, just that some movies – perhaps many movies – are more enjoyable when you can just let them unravel in their own way and on their own time!

I’ll leave you with that, I guess! Marwencol has a great central character and is entertaining, and while the stakes are relatively low it’s nevertheless engaging and compelling the whole way through, and has a few things to impart about the human condition in the bargain! It indulges in many of the same sort of quirky small-town clichés as many fictional indie comedy-dramas, but that’s not its fault! I’m going to give Marwencol three bloodstained Barbies!

Burl reviews 8: The Mor-mon Proposition! (2010)

Burl here to review a documentary feature! This one details the machinations of the Utah Mor-mons who made it their business to interfere in the California proposition to ban gay marriage, which appeared on the ballot in November of 2008! I remember following this story and, frankly, making the assumption that the proposition wouldn’t come within a mile of passing; but I was wrong, and the lesson, I guess – and the lesson in this documentary – is not to underestimate how much organized socially conservative religious people are determined to interfere in other peoples’ lives!

So there’s an interesting and relevant story here, and with the recent judicial declaration that this proposition is unconstitutional, it’s timely once again also! So it’s pretty unfortunate that this tale is told in such a cheap, unimaginative and out-of-whack movie as this one! Let me give you an example of the movie’s approach! One of the interviewees is enumerating the elements necessary to influence a vote in a place as large as California! One, he says, is money! Cut to a shot of hands counting fake-looking bills! Two: volunteers willing to go door-to-door! Cut to a shot of someone knocking on a door! Three is something less tangible, like influence, and the filmmakers’ limited imaginations were unable to come up with a crashingly on-the-nose visual to go along with it, so they just show a shot of a building and leave it at that! Ha ha, nice try!

But I’m far from the ideal audience for this picture! It may shock you to learn this, but ol’ Burl is a fairly cosmopolitan guy! I live in a place where gay marriage has been legal for years, so I can tell you with cheerful certainty that it presents no danger to so-called “traditional” marriage or to the fabric of society! I don’t require documentaries such as this to endorse marriage for whatever consenting adults want it! I have friends who are in gay marriages and who are raising happy, well-adjusted kids, so I don’t need to be persuaded that these families are perfectly normal! The idea that anyone could think otherwise is what tends to surprise me! And I’m not in the least surprised to learn that Mor-mons were behind the big money push to influence the California vote! I thought it was common knowledge, but this movie presents it as though they’re unveiling a shocking and little-known revelation!

A gay couple whose marriage was rent asunder by these meddling Mor-mons are the default main characters, and most of their screen time is them telling us that they truly love one another and that they deserve to be allowed to marry the same as anyone else, and that it’s all about love! Since I take those things for granted, I was pretty much looking at my watch, waiting for the movie to go deeper! It could have presented all those things with some choice visuals, showing these guys at home or something, instead of having them repeat it over and over! But like I said, not much imagination at work here!

Still, I learned a few things! I’d never heard of this loathsome Senator Buttars guy before, and I could have gone through life quite happy never to have heard of him I guess, but now at least I can picture his horrible face as the proposition he so unctuously championed is undone by the very constitution he presumably would have had to swear allegiance to at some point! So maybe that made watching this thudding and ponderous doc somewhat worthwhile!

I certainly wish this had turned out better, because as I say, it’s an interesting story! Perhaps, as the story is ongoing, there is a more ferocious, more stylish and more dynamic effort yet to come! I give 8: The Mor-mon Proposition one single easily-pressured Mor-mon!  

Burl reviews Lightning Over Water! (1980)

Hi, it’s me, Burl, and I’m back! Ha ha, for anyone who’s counting, this is my one hundredth movie review! Ha ha, it’s all so delightful!

Anyway, I’m here to review the movie Lightning Over Water, which I guess fits into the same microgenre as another movie I reviewed a while back, Voyage in Time, which followed director Andrei Tarkovsky around Italy as he prepared a new movie! This one is about director Nicholas Ray as he tries to make a new movie with his pal Wim Wenders, but the grim spectre of death gets in the way! Talk about your microgenres – I guess you’d call it the autobiographical movie director semi-documentary! There are probably some more out there, and if I come across one, I’ll be sure to review it! Or if you think of one, be sure to let me know about it! Ha ha, thanks!

Lightning Over Water starts with Wim Wenders arriving in New York to hang out with his buddy Nick, the great director of such classics as Bigger Than Life! Nick is awfully sick though, and they decide to collaborate on a movie that would essentially be about Nick and Wim trying to make this movie! Of course it’s really a movie about Nick Ray dying, and about the passions that had kept him going this long (movies; smoking), and about the little world of acolytes he’s gathered around him for the final act of his life! And in the background, Susan Ray, his wife, wears a slightly strained expression and practices a lot of yoga! This can’t have been a very easy time for her, so she’s a pretty impressive character in her own right!

She’s also proved a good steward of Nick Ray’s life and work in the years since his death, recently having seen through to release his final solo feature, We Can’t Go Home Again, which we see glimpses of in this movie! We also see a nice chunk of Ray’s Robert Mitchum picture The Lusty Men, which I’ve never seen in full! Ha ha, I think it’s time, because it looks pretty great!

Much of Lightning Over Water is Wim Wenders reflecting on Ray, on his relationship with Ray, and on his worries of how this movie they’re making is impacting Ray’s health and his own feelings toward the great director! He relates an argument he has with another acolyte, a guy named Tom, over whether they should be thinking of Nick as a father figure! Tom claims it’s natural and proper to do so, while Wim believes it would just interfere with what the relationship should actually be, and would prevent them from knowing Nick first and foremost as a person in a simple, direct and human way! I appreciate that point of view, but it’s pretty clear throughout that Wenders is caught in a pretty bad case of hero worship, which is sort of the same thing! But that would be hard to avoid with a figure as accomplished and iconic as Nick Ray!

Ray himself is the heart and soul of this movie, of course, and it’s great in that it doesn’t crowd him or ask too much of him, but still makes it clear how scared he is behind his cigare*te-smoking tough-guy façade! We also get a sense of the betrayal he still rightly feels at having been dumped by Hollywood in the early 60s for being a troublemaker and a boozehound! It’s a sad story, but the whole point of Lightning Over Water is to provide Ray a chance to go out with his head held high, and by that measure, and by most others I can think of, it’s a marvelous success! I give Lightning Over Water four hacking morning coughs!

Burl reviews Famous T & A! (1982)

Burl coming at you with a review of one of those clip movies! Ha ha, you probably remember those things – they made quite a few of them back in the 1980s, mostly of horror movies! There was Terror on Tape, Terror in the Aisles, Filmgore, The Best of Sex & Violence and It Came From Hollywood, and probably more! They would usually have host segments featuring people like Donald Pleasance or Nancy Allen or John Candy or Cameron Mitchell or John Carradine or Elvira or Cheech and Chong, and then there would be clips from various movies, sometimes organized into themes or sometimes just random!

Famous T & A, hosted solo by Sybil Danning, has its own general theme, which is the boobs and bums of semi-famous and not-so-famous ladies of the silver screen! Other than that it seems to have been organized much in the manner that Jackson Pollock organized his paint droplets! The whole thing opens with Sybil putting on some sexy golden-tin armor and waving a sword around, and then she intones some crazy, sometimes factually incorrect monologues about the beautiful ladies who have dazzled us with their pulchritude! We then get clips from movies like Tanya’s Island, Slave of the Cannibal God, Sweet Sugar and Truck Stop Women, occasionally broken up by some more sword-waving from Sybil!

A few of the clips come in the form of trailers, particularly for The Single Girls, and for Terminal Island and Sweet Sugar we actually get multiple takes of the same scene, complete with slate! They aren’t bloopers or anything like that, just different takes of the same shot! Not very enlightening, ha ha!

All in all, it’s kind of a boring cruickshank of a motion picture! The video box implies that we’ll see all sorts of now-famous people in various states of undress, and sure, we do see naked ladies, but they somehow manage to drain that experience of any prurient interest whatever! Ha ha, quite a feat! But some of the ladies listed don’t even appear in the movie, I’m pretty sure! And worst of all perhaps is the stuff they make Sybil Danning say! My gosh, it makes the end credits of Howling II seem like a exercise in dignified solemnity by comparison! The poor woman – I hope she was at least well paid!

Because I enjoyed a couple of the trailers – I have a weakness for trash-movie trailers, I have to admit! – and because they run the tail credits over a painted, clenched buttocks, I award this stultifying bore a single tit maniac!

Burl reviews Voyage in Time! (1983)

Hi, Burl here with a new review! This one is of Voyage in Time, a documentary made for Italian TV by none other than Andrei Tarkovsky! Ha ha, I love Tarkovsky’s movies! I was hooked when I saw Andrei Rublev, and then later I watched Mirror again and again! I might have to watch that one again soon, actually!

Voyage in Time shows us Tarkovsky hanging out in Italy with the screenwriter Tonino Guerra, who wrote a bunch of Michelangelo Antonioni movies, as they work on the screenplay for Nostalghia, a movie I’ve never seen! Well I’m going to have to catch up with it now! They travel around Italy, and their voyage is captured on film by the great cameraman Luciano Tovoli, who shot Dario Argento’s fine witch picture Suspiria and his gore-mystery Tenebrae! He also shot Antonioni’s The Passenger, and, of course, Single White Female!

The dynamic between Guerra and Tarkovsky is pretty funny! Guerra keeps taking Tarkovsky to all these beautiful tourist spots along Italy’s southern coast, and with each gorgeous, historic spot the Russian helmer gets more and more grumpy, complaining that he feels like he’s on holiday instead of working! Ha ha! He doesn’t want to see all these tourist spots, and doesn’t think their as-yet unnamed character from their as-yet unnamed movie would be in such places either!

But Guerra’s answer to this is a good one, I think! He tells of an old master artist who lived nearby, and how the artist was teaching some students, and gave them each an iron ball to hold in their hand! With their other hand he asked them to draw a circle, and they did; but these were not simply circles! They had slight spherical qualities to them, or the ghost of a sphere, as though drawn from the balls held in the other hands! Guerra agrees that they will not be shooting their film at any beautiful historic locations, but that this Italy, the Italy of song and story that he himself loves so well and considers essential to the story, will appear subtly in the film nevertheless, now that, having visited them, Tarkovsky can hold them in his brainpan like the master's balls were held in the art students’ hands! Ha ha!

There are several scenes in the movie where Guerra reads letters sent by film enthusiasts, asking questions of Tarkovsky, like what advice he would give young filmmakers and what directors he himself admires and has learned from! I loved those scenes! Just hearing one master director talk about other ones that he likes gave had me feeling pretty good! He makes reference to Dovzshenko, Bresson, Vigo, Antonioni and Fellini, and another Russian director I was unfamiliar with!

On top of all this are some beautiful shots of Italy, both of the picture-postcard variety and of details, such as the courtyard of a monk’s cloister filled with purple hydrangeas or steam rising off a pool at sunrise! But these delicate moments are a part of the film’s largely unintentional elegiac atmosphere, as of course we now know that Tarkovsky had only two films left in him at that point, including the marvelous The Sacrifice, before he would die of lung cancer in 1986!

It doesn’t come up in the film itself, but it was only with great difficulty that the Soviets could be persuaded to let the director, whose movies they didn’t even like that much, out of the country to do this trip at all! No wonder he didn’t want to waste time doing tourist stuff! And of course he was missing his family terribly! It’s a melancholy tale, but very much worth watching, and I give this pastoral little journey three and a half poems in dialect!