#pimp aip

[sweet-dottie-dan-dan]

😻Meowbruary🩷

Day 1

[twittercomfrnklin2001-blog]

The Wild Party

Some bad films are painful to watch. You see good people working hard to sell material that was pretty much doomed from the start. Were THE WILD PARTY (1975, TCMs) not credited as a Merchant-Ivory production directed by James Ivory, it would be hard to link it to films like A ROOM WITH A VIEW (1985), HOWARDS END (1992) or the unjustly neglected JANE AUSTEN IN MANHATTAN (1980). The film was reedited by AIP, but it's hard to see if there was anything in it that could have worked. This loose adaptation of James Moncure March’s 1928 narrative poem transplants the action from Greenwich Village to Hollywood. Instead of focusing on the tangled relationships of the guests and hosts at a party thrown by violent vaudeville comedian Burrs and his dancer mistress Queenie, it’s about failing silent film clown Jolly Grimm (James Coco) trying to revive his career with a screening of a feature he’s written, directed, starred in and financed. Grimm’s film flops, though in places it looks lots better than the sorry mess surrounding it. Screenwriter Walter Marks chooses to frame the film with a fictionalized version of March (David Dukes) narrating from a hospital bed after the fact. He reads bits of the original interspersed with new lines added to incorporate the change in setting and plot, and they don’t match up well. Coco, Dukes, Perry King as a hot new movie star, Royal Dano as Coco’s chauffeur and Tiffany Bolling as a singer involved with King all act up a storm. But the leading lady is Raquel Welch and she’s almost as dreadful as she is beautiful. She connects to part of one monolog (about her days as a struggling starlet), but when she talks of her past with Coco’s character, she has no relationship to what she’s describing. Most of her line readings lack spontaneity and except for her dancing, even her movement seems as if she were repeating something by rote. Even her dancing gets upstaged. There’s a big number (choreographed by Patricia Birch) in which she looks great until Don De Natale as Jackie (in this version a bisexual pimp and drug dealer) shows you what dancing really looks like. In the same way, when Coco has scenes with Dukes, whose character wrote the titles for the film within a film, you get to see what two stage pros can do with even bad dialog.

[ravensunday6-blog]

“Black, Bold and Bloody Mean!” Isaac Hayes *Is* Truck Turner – Action Classic Screens Oct. 10 at NEIU in 35mm

The Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University – Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave General Admission: $7 • NEIU Students: $3

Wednesday, October 10 @ 7:30 PM TRUCK TURNER Directed by Jonathan Kaplan • 1974 “He’s a skip tracer, the last of the bounty hunters, living on blood money and borrowed time.” A paunchy studio rat whose cinema bonafides were previously limited to soundtrack work, Isaac Hayes improbably proved the perfect anchor to one of the wildest films to come out of the ’70s Black action movie boom. Hayes stars as the most indelibly named title character this side of Foxy Brown, an ex-football player turned skip tracer who specializes in taking the dirtiest cases for the biggest payouts. Chockablock with unrelenting action setpieces capable of giving any poliziotteschi a run for its money and set to an infectious, horn-laden score by Hayes that actually bests his Oscar-feted work on Shaft, Truck Turner renders the urban action thriller as comic book tableau, where bounty hunters and pimps battle for primacy in a Los Angeles that’s all weed-stricken vacant lots, gaudy mini-mansions, and molten pavement stretching in every direction. For everything larger than life about Truck Turner, Hayes cuts a refreshingly grounded figure, a spiritual sibling to Elliot Gould’s schlubby private dick in the previous year’s The Long Goodbye. Even the baddest mothers have to deal with their cats peeing on their stuff. (CW) 91 min • American International Pictures • 35mm from Park Circus Preceded by: AIP Trailer Reel

 Check out the full schedule here!

Source: http://www.chicagofilmsociety.org/2018/10/04/black-bold-and-bloody-mean-isaac-hayes-is-truck-turner-action-classic-screens-oct-10-at-neiu-in-35mm/

[sweet-dottie-dan-dan]

Meowbruary

🐱Day 9🩷