Thursday, July 17, 2014

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V on Thursday: the links

Starting Over
Below, the links to this week's reviews and citations; terribly sorry for the various delays this week (my computer in the shop, the press of work, various smaller distractions--I should be back on the Regular Schedule next week). As always, please let me know in comments when I've missed yours or someone else's...and, as always, thanks to all our contributors and to you readers...

Anne Billson: The Suicide Shop

Bill Crider: InnerSpace  trailer

Brian Arnold: AMC Pacer ads 

BV Lawson: Media Murder

Comedy Film Nerds: Allan Havey at the TCM Classic Film Festival

Dan Stumpf: Hell's Heroes

Ed Lynskey: Dillinger (1945 film)

Elizabeth Foxwell: The Bat

Evan Lewis: Johnny Ringo (tv series)

George Kelley: Monsters vs. Aliens: Supersonic Joyride

Entre Les Murs
Greg Proops Film Club

How Did This Get Made?: Peter Fonda on Easy Rider 2

Iba Dawson: In Honor of La Fête Nationale (Bastile Day)

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: The Prisoner of Shark Island

Jackie Kashian: Eric Hollerbach on the original Whose Line Is It Anyway? and RT (Russia Today), etc.


Jacqueline T. Lynch: Chip Off the Old Block; The Merry Monahans

Bettie Page Reveals All!
James Reasoner: Somewhere in the Night

Jayme Lynn Blaschke: Bettie Page Reveals All!; Babylon-5:  "Infection"

Jerry House: Tales of Tomorrow: "The Crystal Egg"

John Charles: Redline

John Grant: Baryshnya i Khuligan (aka The Lady and the Hooligan); Alias Mary Smith; Wonders in the Dark

Jonathan Lewis: Beyond the Time Barrier; Plunder of the Sun; The Abominable Dr. Phibes

Kliph Nesteroff: Jackie Mason on The Grube Tube (NYC public access television), 1980

The Pajama Game
Laura: The Swordsman: Five Came Back; Her Sister's Secret

Lucy Brown: The Pajama Game: conferences at Oxford and elsewhere

Martin Edwards: EQMM Podcast: "No Flowers"; Run, Lola, Run

Marty McKee: Asteroid vs. Earth

Michael Shonk: Counterspy; David Harding, Counterspy (tv pilots)

Mystery Dave: The Lawnmower Man

Patti Abbott: Starting Over; Best episodes of tv series

Peter Rosovsky: Get Carter and its peers.

Prashant Trikannad: Raid on Entebbe

Randy Johnson: The Big Steal: Apocalypse Joe (aka Un uomo chiamato Apocalisse Joe)

Foyle's War
Rick: Raymond Chandler on his a/v adaptations

Rod Lott: Single Room Furnished

Ron Scheer: Librivox audiobooks

Sergio Angelini: John Dickson Carr on radio

Stacia Jones: Cold in July: The Discoverers

Stephen Bowie: The Best TV Series of 2000-2009

Steve Lewis: Girl on the Run

Yvette Banek: Foyle's War: Season/series 8

Todd Mason: Nadine Gordimer Stories: as noted in this blog previously:

The Gordimer Stories
A selection of eight short films, including an interview with Nadine Gordimer herself, which was shown on at least some PBS stations as a series, all the drama set in South Africa in depths of apartheid and the small and large tragedies those laws force upon the characters, and the attempts to subvert and overcome the noxious racist regime.

...which included: 
City Lovers (1982): 
A short film based on Nadine Gordimer's story, and presented on public stations in the 1980s as part of the Nadine Gordimer Stories package, this was the most affecting of the group among those I saw, offering a charming yet telling liaison between a young "colored" ("mixed-race") South African woman and an older "white" German visitor to SA, back in the last years of apartheid, and how his foolhardiness and the insanity of the national institutional racism messes them over.


The Burglar
And I've just seen this past week the David Goodis-scripted (from his novel) The Burglar. This is, almost without question, the most ineptly-acted fully professional film I've seen; aside from an actually competent performance by Martha Vickers, Jayne Mansfield perhaps embarrasses herself the least. There is no scenery left unchewed by about 15 minutes in...if you've ever wondered why Philly looked so run-down by the 1970s, the mastication of locations by this film's cast was a minor but not insignificant factor.

2 comments:

Sergio (Tipping My Fedora) said...

I'll clearly have to watch THE BURGLAR again - I saw it about 15 years ago in a season devoted to Goodis and remember quite liking it, not least for its various hommages to the work of Orson Welles. But I haven't seen it since though ...

Todd Mason said...

The cinematography, as distinct from the acting and direction, is superb. Hard to tell if Goodis's script would've worked much better with somewhat less, shall we put it, over-demonstrative performances. Well, as mentioned, Vickers isn't bad at what she does here.