Tickets to this life-altering event2 are in the vicinity of $300 per person and include unlimited popcorn and soda.
Whenever possible, the same sources will be used as commentary for different movies that compose the film. For example, if a Twitter user in Chicago tweets, “Twilight is a piece of shit,” and, later, that same user tweets, “Down in the Dirt in Texas changed my life,” both commentaries will be used during the film.3
There has been some controversy about the length and price of TTAF. In some cities there are reports of the film playing to empty theaters (which is in itself a fascinating thought experiment). But in cities where tickets are often sold out, audience participation adds a whole other dimension to the film. For example, Wikipedia reports that in a Brooklyn screening of TTAF, during one of the top-grossing movies, a local woman’s Facebook post appeared on the screen: “Do we really need to see Jennifer Lawrence in another modern-day fairy tale steeped in dark mythology, turning the trope of woman-as-victim into one of woman-as-hero? I mean must we sit through this?” When the post appeared on the screen, the East Williamsburg crowd erupted into cheers.
These are the meta-moments TTAF bring to us, and these moments change our lives. We realize that we are sitting in a movie theater with like-minded moviegoers, all able and willing to pay for a $300 ticket, brought together by social media and the Internet. During a San Francisco screening4, upon the opening credits of Gothic Love Nest, a snippet of an email appeared on screen: “Why do they make these movies? Do we really need another movie about teenagers falling in love? Come on! Real women don’t fall in love!” This commentary was also met with approval in the theater.
Some versions of TTAF are presented for hours without commentary, as many people in a particular town or area will never have heard of a number of the movies. Even if some of these townspeople, most likely in remote areas of the country, happen to watch the film, how will they know what to think about certain movies, if said movies are presented without commentary? This leads one to ponder the sad life of those who do not live in major cities.
There have also been reports of charities offering to foot the $300 bill in areas where the film plays to empty houses. “I have a life to live, no thank you,” one woman said. “I don’t want to be forced to sit through movies I’m not interested in,” said an ornery old man. “I’ll just watch what I want, when I want. I’m sure others are capable of doing the same.”5
The lesson this reviewer comes away with is that one cannot force culture on a people, and one cannot force a consciousness shift, and that escapism of any kind is the ultimate insult to life as we know it.
* * *
1Full disclosure: author did not see the film.
2For the purpose of clarity, hereafter the twenty-four-hour event will be referred to as a “film.” The twelve components of the film will be referred to as “movies.”
3Surely everyone on earth will agree with these two statements.
4As reported by a blog on the internet.
5This may appear to be a reasonable statement, but where would we be as a society if we didn’t give our opinions and critique to media for which we were never the intended audience?
Wow, what an amazing year! I want to thank each and every one of you readers for checking my blog Unknown-Celluloid-Classics.net. With your help, and a tiny mention in the Maryland Film Fanatic zine, the site has now reached more than two thousand weekly readers! Exciting stuff.
I also wanted to thank you by giving you a “best of.” What follows are my favorite reviews of “lost” and “cult” movies that I was privileged enough to have told all of you about. Don’t forget! You heard about these from me first!
In no particular order:
Andy Warhol’s Bowel Movement
This is a good one and ultra, ultra rare. In 1967, Andy Warhol filmed himself sitting on the toilet for an entire year. He ate, slept and, yes, went toilet. The film is shot in real time and will take you an entire year to watch, but there’s an abbreviated version that runs about four months. I don’t recommend that version, as you’d be missing out on some really key plot points. The movie was shot on eight-millimeter, in black and white, with a soundtrack by the amazing 1960s band Young Man With a Flower, featuring a very, very young Phil Collins. Good luck finding the soundtrack, which is worth about fifty dollars! If you’re not doing anything for a year and need a fun way to pass the time, you could definitely do a hell of a lot worse.
Styx: Live at the Capitol Center, September 5, 1989
This bootleg was shot on a VHS camera by a man from Potomac, Maryland. The man’s name is lost to history, but we can thank him for preserving the last Styx tour before Dennis DeYoung caught a rare Amazonian virus (fishing nude in Brazil) and left the group to start a boutique candle business.
Everyone knows that Styx is best remembered for their amazing and fully realized concept album Kilroy Was Here. But what everyone does not realize is that Styx released another rock opera, this one in 1989, that was also about robots. In this case, the robots take over an ice cream shop in Atlanta. They refuse to serve vanilla or chocolate ice cream for political reasons, and the locals go insane. Dennis DeYoung plays Stuey, an assistant manager who appeals to the community through song and gentle hand movements.
In the beginning of this 1989 concert, Dennis is wearing an orange and brown smock and he is holding an ice cream scooper. He then launches into the album’s biggest hit, “Bathroom’s Only for Lovers.” At the end of the concert, Dennis is wearing a yellow suit and is singing “Flavor of the Day: Happiness.” It’s a fantastic concert and ultra, ultra, ULTRA rare. Known to sell on eBay for as high as forty-five dollars.
Dennis DeYoung died a few years ago. He packed a ton of love into those eighty-three years.
The Shining: The Completely Unedited Cut
Stanley Kubrick was never completely satisfied with the final cut of 1980’s The Shining, so he released the movie into a few German theaters in 1991 with this unedited version. No one showed up at those screenings, and no one has seen this version since (unfortunately, his wife locked it away in a vault), but it’s rumored to have an entirely new ending: Jack Torrance, now back in the world of 1927, wants to make money, so he invents the cheese-in-the-crust pizza and becomes fabulously rich. He also invests in Apple and pets.com. One out of two ain’t bad! That’s all I know. If you have a copy, email me!
M. Night Shyamalan’s Unnamed Third, Fifth and Seventh Projects
Shyamalan is a genius, I don’t think there’s much argument over that fact. What’s not well known is that he wrote, directed and released three projects that went straight to video:
The Fateful Night of the Rainbow Catcher (2001)
The Moist Stump (2003)
Intergalactic Hugs (2011)
Here are the twists for each of these movies:
Fudge doesn’t melt at that temperature. Also, that wasn’t fudge.
Wood sprites are incapable of growing large afros.
It wasn’t the retarded guy who lives in the woods. Actually, it was the retarded guy who lives in the woods.
I pray that all of these will one day be released. Shyamalan is a brilliant auteur, very humble, and he deserves a lot more respect and recognition.
Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Went to Rwanda
For the entire decade of the nineties, Jerry Lewis was hooked on methadone. Because of that, he has no memory making this movie that he wrote, directed, and starred in. The movie is called The Day the Clown Went to Rwanda, and that’s basically the entire plot. Jerry—playing an unemployed clown named Wolfgart—travels to Rwanda to cheer up the poor orphans who will soon face their own grisly deaths. Wolfgart performs magic tricks, walks a tightrope (only a few feet off the ground), and sprays water out of his fake bowtie and into the mud. The kids really laugh. Three people have
seen this movie, including a former reviewer for The Washington Post, Anthony Hoagland, who wrote: “Like watching a snuff film but without the laughs.”
I think that’s way, way too harsh, but having never seen this movie, I can’t really prove otherwise. I do know that it was all shot in Jerry’s backyard in Las Vegas and features no one of color.
Pluckett & Farley
Burt Reynolds is amazingly prolific. He has starred in over three hundred movies and about two hundred TV shows. He never stops. Burt was especially in his prime in the mid-seventies, but no one seems to have ever seen Pluckett & Farley, even though it’s available on Blockbuster streaming. I do know that the movie was shown at an Alabama drive-in theater in ’76 and never seen again. The rumor is that the guy who owned the drive-in traded the movie for enough money to keep the drive-in going for another month, after which it immediately went out of business for good.
I’m a sucker for any movie that features intelligent orangutans doing human things, like giving a thumbs-up, blowing a raspberry, or just mouthing off to racist cops.
This movie has none of that, but it does feature a really beautiful orangutan named Farley who was rescued somewhere in Africa and then purchased by Burt for $200 at a Kentucky Derby party.
Whenever Farley gets mad or scared, he attacks everything in sight and rips off limbs. If that doesn’t sound funny, rest assured that it’s hilarious on the screen.
In one scene, Burt (who plays Pluckett) tells Farley to fetch him a beer. Farley goes the fridge but comes back with a soda. Burt kicks Farley out of the house. Farley then goes on a rampage, attempting to kill anyone who tries to stop him, including a redneck sheriff and an uppity woman who hates alcohol. Both die, but it’s okay, as both weren’t very nice. (It’s interesting: in the novelization to this film, the orangutan is played by a donkey. Not sure why they changed it.)
The movie ends with Farley being put down by a zookeeper in a helicopter as Burt stands before a gorgeous sunset and weeps. There was no sequel.
Side note: I saw this movie in the basement of a movie theater. I’m friends with the manager and we like to use his office for watching movies while the new (and lame) movies are playing upstairs. Anyway, after watching Pluckett & Farley, I was so jazzed, so excited by what I had just seen (that very few others ever had) that I ran up to the lobby and started yelling to the people coming out of Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds. No one seemed particularly interested. This happens all the time.
Folks, that is the best of the best! If you’re feeling generous, please donate to the site! Unearthing these gems ain’t free.
Bootleg Mike
[email protected]
Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Starring: Macaulay Culkin, Catherine O’Hara, John Heard, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, and Alan Ruck.
Remember a couple of months back when photos began to surface of an emaciated and bearded Macaulay Culkin, leading to speculation that the former child star was drug-addled, destitute, or some combination of the two? Mac stayed mum, but directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (21 Jump Street) ended the speculation when they announced that Culkin was getting into character and that they would be making what is technically the sixth installment in the Home Alone franchise. But does America really need to go Home again? Can such a premise hold any charm for audiences too young to remember the first films or too old to not be disillusioned by the intervening years?
Home Alone: Repossessed opens with a quick succession of scenes in which the now adult Kevin McCallister (Culkin) loses his job at an unnamed tech firm, his beautiful and much younger fiancée, and lastly his soulless, sprawling box of a house somewhere in the Las Vegas suburbs. Reduced to some home office furniture, a flat-screen TV, and several boxes of Annie’s organic mac & cheese, Kevin is rescued, as it were, from the Great Recession by the fortuitous timing of a phone call from his parents and a Tivo’d movie. It seems that the elder MacCallisters (Catherine O’Hara and John Heard, squandered in what amounts to little more than a cameo) are away on a second honeymoon cruise in Alaska. After watching Angels with the Dirtiest Faces of Them All late one night and seeing one of the gangster characters evade capture by hiding out in an abandoned house, Kevin gets a brilliant idea: he’s going to return to Illinois, break into his temporarily empty childhood home, and survive there for as long as he can. In a neat twist, the former defender of the domestic has now become an invader.
Culkin is thirty-three and wears his years well. There’s a brilliant moment early in the film when Kevin awakes in his practically empty house, trudges into the bathroom, and goes through what is essentially shot-for-shot the same sequence from the first Home Alone. Those of us old enough to remember that film will no doubt feel a lump in our collective throats when Kevin splashes the aftershave on his cheeks without the slightest reaction. He simply stares for a moment in the mirror and then runs his hands through his thinning hair before pinching a blackhead on his brow. Here is a portrait of a man who has lost faith in himself and the world.
Adding to Kevin’s problems is the inevitable return of the Wet Bandits. A parallel plotline follows the parole of Harry (Joe Pesci, who must be grateful for something to do other than parodies of himself in Snickers commercials), who is picked up outside the gates of Statesville by his old partner Marv (Daniel Stern) in a scene reminiscent of the beginning of The Blues Brothers. Harry is still sore, physically and psychologically, from his past encounters with Kevin. He’s also terminally ill with prostate cancer. As a final gift to a friend, Marv suggests that they return to the one house they couldn’t successfully burgle, and the course is set for a collision between the squatter and the thieves.
The second third of the movie is basically a rehash of Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, but the elaborate traps and sadistic pranks feel tired this time around as Kevin and the Wet Bandits battle for control of the house. In a key moment, with Marv stuck in the kitchen window á la Pooh Bear and with Harry, clutching his groin, his hair singed and one hand stuck in a food processor, Kevin sinks to the floor and starts to sob. He admits to the crooks his various failures. He never imagined that the high point in his life would have been besting them. Now they’re clutching at straws and scrambling after crumbs. “How did everything go so wrong?” Kevin asks. Reminding us why he won an Academy Award, an amazingly tender Pesci finds a soul in Harry, who manages to somehow comfort Kevin while giving vent to a long-simmering rage. In Home Alone: Repossessed, it’s not only criminals but also the children of the nineties who’ve been screwed over by the system.
In the final act, Kevin and the Bandits go to Chicago to take on the real crooks. It seems that the mayor (Alan Ruck, in a piece of inspired casting) has been getting cozy with corporate interests and large campaign donors at the expense of the citizens. Our heroes align themselves with some Occupy-like outfit and use the tried-and-true traps and tortures to expose the Mayor’s malfeasance.
Home Alone grossed over $533 million and remains one of the most popular films of the 1990s, a decade that in retrospect seems more and more like a Golden Age. It would be nice to think that Hollywood would be attuned to how things have changed and offer up stories that help us to conceive of better futures rather than to long for unrecoverable pasts, but the movies have always trafficked in nostalgia, which requires less thought and brings in more receipts at the box office. Look for Home Alone: Repossessed to be the first in a wave of films that represent the 1990s as a paradise lost.
Case in point, just last week Variety reported that director Penny Marshall and star Tom Hanks have signed on for Small, which involves a now middle-aged and morose Josh Baskin searching for a magical Zoltan machine to make him a little boy once more.
Directed by Lars von Trier.
Most critics dismiss sequels and prequels as vehicles of basic financial prostitution, and in the past, the Karate Kid franchise has been no exception. While there are those who are qu
ick to remind us that Pat Morita was originally nominated for an Academy Award for the first film of the series, there are countless others who pan the latter three or four films (depending on whether or not you view the Miyagi-less Smith/Chan product as a true sequel as some KK purists do not) as overly commodified garbage. But now this ferocious and oftentimes literally bloody, debate has been settled once and for all by the newest installment in the series, a prequel this time, that focuses upon a teenaged Miyagi and his Polish student “Jerzy,” who goes on to become the grandfather of the greatest cinematic villain of all time: Johnny Lawrence.
Johnny Lawrence was played brilliantly in KKI by a young ingénue named William Zabka, and director/writer Lars von Trier blurs the fourth wall by naming his teenaged concentration camp prisoner protagonist “Jerzy Zabka.” The choice of von Trier and his avant-garde Dogme 95 beliefs is in and of itself a bold demonstration of the film’s producer Tyler Perry’s commitment to resuscitate the overall artistic image of martial arts-based narratives. And von Trier’s continued insistence upon raw filmmaking techniques and banishment of non-diegetic production actually works seamlessly in this tale that interweaves the profound and often simple philosophies of the martial arts into the inspirational story of the systematic murdering of millions of Jews.
Critically Acclaimed Page 7