#dov hoenig

[cinesludge]

Movie #25 of 2024: Manhunter

[sesiondemadrugada]

The Crow (Alex Proyas, 1994).

[genevieveetguy]

- I know that I'm not smarter than you. - Then how did you catch me? - You had disadvantages. - What disadvantages? - You're insane.

Manhunter, Michael Mann (1986)

[icollectimages]

Thief (1981)

Country: United States

Written & Directed by: Michael Mann Based on the novel “The Home Invaders: Confessions of a Cat Burglar” by: Frank Hohimer

Cinematography by: Donald E. Thorin

Edited by: Dov Hoenig

Produced by: Jerry Bruckheimer & Ronnie Caan

Music by: Tangerine Dream

Production Design by: Mel Bourne

Art Direction by: Mary Dodson

[supercultshow]

Hello Supercult West! This is Supercult South Bad Movie Professor Cameron Coker (BS in “Hebrew Rock Musicals” with a minor in “Only Hippies Go To Heaven”) and I’m reaching out to you from across the country to help hype tonight’s screening of the 1980 sci-fi musical comedy, The Apple!

The year is 1975 and Coby Recht, a successful Israeli rock producer, is signed to Barclay Records, led by French producer Eddie Barclay. However, the upstanding Recht was so put off by the villainous business practices in the music industry and his personal experience with Mr. Barclay that he and his wife Iris Yotvat spend six weeks in Paris writing a musical about conformity and rebellion while making use of biblical allegory. In the film, Alphie and Bibi take part in the 1994 Worldvision Song Festival, but despite their superior skill, are defeated by the underhanded tactics of Boogalow International Music and its leader Mr. Boogalow. The duo are then approached by Boogalow and enticed into the seedy underworld of show business and must work together to resist temptation and escape Boogalow’s evil clutches. Recht said it was “supposed to be 1984, but with music.”

It’s like 1984, but with music…and also 10 years later.

Triangles are in this year, darling. Get with it or get out of our way.

OH NO! TRIANGLES!

A large number of the extras and background artists appearing in this musical were cast from the American High School in Berlin. They were reportedly paid about 50 marks per day.

Corporate fascism has never looked so good!

Psst! I think that’s the Apple thing they’ve been talking about this whole time!

“Am I the devil, no, absolutely not. Am I a symbol for the devil? Here, take this pill and stop asking silly questions.”

Um, I prefer my God allegories to be a little more…ya know…lion-y.

THE APPLE IS TEMPTATION! DO YOU GET IT??

Wait, there’s martial arts in this film? Is choreography a martial art??

Let that be a lesson kids. Don’t take drugs. You’ll become a pop star.

Now ask yourself: Is the devil gay because gays are evil or because Satan is in showbiz? Pick your poison, baby, you’re homophobic no matter what.

Recht and his wife created their story for the stage, but the show was too expensive to produce. Recht then heard that his childhood friend Menahem Golan, cousin of Yoram Globus, the very same Golan and Globus that bought Cannon films and with it created such Supercult Classics as Enter the Ninja, American Ninja, Breakin’ 2 Electric Boogaloo, Bloodsport, and the original Highlander, was going to be visiting Israel. One face-to-face meeting later and suddenly The Apple was going to be a movie directed by Menahem Golan himself. Except, perhaps not the movie Recht had originally invisioned. Almost immediately Golan began rewriting the script to add more action and comedy. Yotvat said that Golan was turning the script into “something that was kind of corny,” and Recht stated Golan was making the story “out of touch” and “out of date.”

Over 1000 singers and 200 dancers auditioned for the film, including a dancer who had heard about the auditions from her fellow students, Catherine Mary Stewart. Recht gravitated to Stewart and even lied to Golan about her singing abilities in order to caster he as Bibi.  Meanwhile a film that Recht and Yotvat had expected to cost about $4 million was ballooning to $10 million due to Golan’s wheeling and dealing. Film locales in West Berlin kept getting bigger and more elaborate and Golan was shooting hours of extra footage that would eventually have to be organized and edited. The sequence for the track “Speed” was filmed at the Metropol nightclub, which held the Guinness World record for the biggest indoor laser show at the time. Even though Recht was spending most of his time in London recording the songs, Golan kept demanding that Recht attend shoots in Berlin. Recht recalls arriving on location to a prologue sequence that was suddenly costing $1 million alone to shoot. “He was shooting this part that never ended up on the screen because it was terrible. It was terrible. There was like 15 dinosaurs on the set. I couldn’t believe my eyes.” Nearly everything that could have gone wrong during production did including but not limited to animals getting loose on set, poor singing and dancing being dubbed over or edited together with stunt dancers, Golan nearly getting into a fist fight with the editor Dov Hoenig, and Recht and Yotvat abandoning the production to return to Israel.

Eventually, however, the film was finished. Catherine Mary Stewart recalls Golan predicting great success for the film, citing the many elements he believed were necessary at that time. After all, it was the 80s and a new wave of elaborate film musicals like Grease, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Fiddler on the Roof, and Supercult classics like Tommy, The Wiz, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show were very ‘in’. Unfortunately, Golan’s predictions didn’t pan out. During the premier at the 1980 Montreal World Film Festival, attendees received vinyl records of the music from the film. By the end some watchers were throwing the vinyl records at the screen. A distraught Golan once said afterward, “It’s impossible that I’m so wrong about it. I cannot be that wrong about the movie. They just don’t understand what I was trying to do.”

The Apple has been the subject of many a scathing review and bizarre conspiracy theory since. Nigel Lythgoe and Ken Warwick served as choreographers for the Apple, who later went on to produce reality shows like American Idol, Pop Idol, and So You Think You Can Dance prompting some to theorize that The Apple’s Worldvision Song Festival contest predicts the horrors of reality song and dance competitions. At the 1980 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards, The Apple was considered to be one of the worst films the critics had ever seen, but, just to add insult to injury, the film was considered too low profile to be nominated.

However, the Apple’s 2017 Blue-Ray release the world might have come around to just how so bad it’s good The Apple truly is. Austin Trunick of Under the Radar honored it as “the perfect sort of cult film – unintentionally campy, with an insane premise, great production value, and memorable songs – that most people, once they’ve seen it, spend the rest of their movie-loving lives trying to get it in front of as many other people as possible.” and the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards eventually revised their award listings awarding the Apple wins for worst director and Least “Special” Special Effects and nominations for worst picture, worst song, most intrusive musical score, and worst screenplay.

The Apple is truly a unique implosion of a film. A simple idea about the corrupt touch of show biz corrupted by the touch of one of the most infamous men of show biz there ever was. A film too ambitious and over-the-top for the people attempting to execute on it and simultaneously too unimaginative to hold an audience. It’s irresistibly camp yet repulsively inept. It’s been called not only the worst disco musical ever made, but possibly the worst movie ever made, period, and it comes in at an unremarkable (at least for our crowd) 20% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Are you ready to taste the forbidden fruit Supercultists? I certainly am.

The power of rock… The magic of space! Supercult West is proud to present, The Apple!

The Apple Hello Supercult West! This is Supercult South Bad Movie Professor Cameron Coker (BS in “Hebrew Rock Musicals” with a minor in “Only Hippies Go To Heaven”) and I’m reaching out to you from across the country to help hype tonight’s screening of the 1980 sci-fi musical comedy, The Apple!

[byneddiedingo]

The Keep (Michael Mann, 1983)

Cast: Scott Glenn, Alberta Watson, Jürgen Prochnow, Robert Prosky, Gabriel Byrne, Ian McKellen, William Morgan Sheppard, Royston Tickner, Michael Carter. Screenplay: Michael Mann, based on a novel by F. Paul Wilson. Cinematography: Alex Thomson. Production design: John Box. Film editing: Dov Hoenig. Music: Tangerine Dream.

Could the 210-minute cut of The Keep that Michael Mann originally submitted to Paramount really have been a better film -- or even a good one? Because the 96-minute version now available on the Criterion Channel is a hopeless mess, incoherent and only mildly provocative in what ideas it seems to contain about good and evil. The story of its muddled production, the result of studio interference and the death of a key member of the crew, visual effects supervisor Wally Veever, has been widely told. Even its fine cast, which includes Scott Glenn, Jürgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne, and Ian McKellen, can't save it. Glenn, who is one of those actors who make almost any film they're in better, is oddly cast as some kind of superhero named Glaeken Trismegistus, who instead of setting to work immediately dealing with the monster called Radu Molasar (Michael Carter), spends time bedding Eva Cuza (Alberta Watson), the daughter of the professor (McKellen) brought in to solve the mystery of the keep, the fortress constructed to contain Molasar. Moreover, the professor and his daughter are Jewish, but the SS commandant (Byrne) who has taken charge of the keep doesn't mind pulling them out of the crowd waiting to be sent to a concentration camp: He's losing too many Nazi soldiers to the monster. Yes, there's the makings of a good horror thriller in the film, and there are those who claim to find it in what exists, by filling in its many blanks. But I can only dismiss this as a rare failure by the director who gave us such exceptional films as The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Collateral (2004), and the first movie (and one of the best) to feature Hannibal Lecter, Manhunter (1986). Talk about bouncing back!

[editingmodulations]

“Heat” is the crime film directed by Michael Mann. The film tells the story of Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), a professional thief, and Lt. Vincent Hannadet (Al Pacino). who is hunting McCauley and his gang who are responsible of hingh end robberies.

The film editing of “Heat” was crafted by Dov Hoenig, Pasquale Buba, William Goldenberg, Tom Rolf.

What I love abou this movie is the continuity. Some editors take this for granted and is so important as a filmaker that actions and moments are perfectly connected between shots. These two scenes show how poweful is to achieve this, from a train care to a person walking on the street, no matter the camera angle or framing of the shots.

[rudyroth79]

Știri: Seară literară cu Laura T. Ilea și Dov Hoenig la Paris (25 octombrie 2018)

Știri: Seară literară cu Laura T. Ilea și Dov Hoenig la Paris (25 octombrie 2018)

Joi, 25 octombrie 2018, începând cu ora 18.30, la sediul Institutului Cultural Român de la Paris (1, rue de l’Exposition 75007 Paris) va avea loc cea de-a doua ediție a seratelor literare sub egida ”Le Club”. Evenimentul, organizat periodic de ICR Paris, își propune să faciliteze contactul publicului francez cu scriitorii și artiștii români publicați în Franța.

Rezervare obligatorie la: https://w…

[cinesludge]

Movie #1 of 2021: Dark City

“Shut. It. Down!”

https://www.instagram.com/cathodecinema

[sesiondemadrugada]

The Crow (Alex Proyas, 1994).

[sesiondemadrugada]

The Crow (Alex Proyas, 1994).