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Posted by GPR79 on 09/19/05 11:47
- Payment via bank transfer preferred, then cheque, cash, PO.
FS: Today's Specials - Bela Donna £7, Love Streams £12 & Cyclo £6
**Buy two take £2 OFF, buy all 3 take £3 OFF!**
Love Streams R2 (France)
Cover: http://www.boomspeed.com/gpr79/lovestreams1.JPG
A must have for Cassavettes fans (especially those of you that own the
Criterion boxset)! Full director version (cut in the USA). Lovely
anamorphic transfer. Comes in very nice Digipak style case.
"By Roger Ebert - John Cassavetes's "Love Streams" is the kind of movie
where a woman brings home two horses, a goat, a duck, some chickens, a
dog, and a parrot, and you don't have the feeling that the screenplay is
going for cheap laughs.
In fact, there's a tightening in your throat as you realize how
desperate an act you're witnessing, and how unhappy a person is getting
out of the taxi with all those animals. The menagerie scene occurs
rather late in the film, after we've already locked into Cassavetes'
method. This is a movie about mad people, and they are going to be
acting in crazy ways, but the movie isn't going to let us off the hook
by making them funny or picaresque or even symbolic (as in "King of
Hearts"). They are, quite simply, desperate.
The brother, Robert (played by Cassavetes), is a writer who lives up in
the Hollywood Hills in one of those houses that looks like Architectural
Digest Visits a Motel. He writes trashy novels about bad women. A parade
of hookers marches through his life; he gathers them by the taxiload,
almost as a hobby, and dismisses them with lots of meaningless words
about how he loves them, and how they're sweethearts and babies and
dolls. The circular drive in front of his house is constantly filled
with the cars of the lonely and the desperate. He is an alcoholic who
stays up for two or three days at a stretch, as if terrified of missing
one single unhappy moment. The sister, Sarah (Gena Rowlands), is as
possessive as her brother is evasive. She is in the process of a messy
divorce from her husband (Seymour Cassel), and her daughter is in flight
from her. Rowlands thinks that maybe she can buy love: First she buys
the animals, later she talks about buying her brother a baby, because
that's what he "needs." At least Cassavetes and Rowlands can
communicate. They share perfect trust, although it is the trust of two
people in the same trap. There are other characters in the movie that
Cassavetes talks at and around, but not with. They include a bemused
young singer (Diahnne Abbott) who goes out with Cassavetes but looks at
him as if he were capable of imploding, and a former wife (Michele
Conway) who turns up one day on the doorstep with a small boy and tells
him: "This is your son." The way Cassavetes handles this news is typical
of the movie. The woman wonders if maybe he could babysit for a weekend.
He says he will. He brings the kid into the house, scares him away,
chases him halfway down Laurel Canyon, brings him back, pours him a
beer, has a heart-to-heart about "Women, Life and Marriage," and then
asks the kid if he'd like to go to Vegas. Cut to Vegas.
Cassavetes dumps the kid in a hotel room and goes out partying all
night.
He is incapable of any appropriate response to a situation requiring him
to care about another human being. He fills his life with noise,
hookers, emergencies and booze to drown out the insistent whisper of
duty.
The movie is exasperating, because we never know where we stand or what
will happen next. I think that's one of its strengths: There's an
exhilaration in this rollercoaster ride through scenes that come out of
nowhere. This is not a docudrama or a little psychological playlet with
a lesson to be learned. It is a raw, spontaneous life, and when we laugh
(as in the scene where Cassavetes summons a doctor to the side of the
unconscious Rowlands), we wince.
Viewers raised on trained and tame movies may be uncomfortable in the
world of Cassavetes; his films are built around lots of talk and the
waving of arms and the invoking of the gods. Cassavetes has been making
these passionate personal movies for twenty-five years, ever since his
"Shadows" helped create American underground movies. His titles include
"Minnie and Moskowitz" (in which Rowlands and Cassel got married),
"Faces," "A Woman Under the Influence," "The Killing of a Chinese
Bookie," "Gloria," "Opening Night" and "Husbands." Sometimes (as in
"Husbands") the wild truth-telling approach evaporates into a lot of
empty talk and play-acting.
In "Love Streams," it works. "
&
Bela Donna R0 (Korea)
Cover: http://www.boomspeed.com/gpr79/bela.jpg
The 'lost' Natasha Henstridge film.
"An American couple move to the State of Ceará, Brazil, in the 1930s.
The husband (Andrew McCarthy) is looking for oil. His beautiful wife,
Donna (Natasha Henstridge), soon falls in love with a rude but charming
fisherman. The forbidden romance may destroy her marriage and upset the
morals of the small village where they live. Natasha Henstridge's
steamiest role since Species! "
&
Cyclo R4
Cover: http://www.boomspeed.com/gpr79/cyclo.jpg
Winner Golden Lion (Best Film) Venice Film Festival
"The city was once named Saigon; it is now called Ho Chi Minh City, and
in this powerful second feature by Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung
(The Scent of Green Papaya) it looks like a lost circle of hell.
Cyclo is a survey of a society in decay, in which conventional plotting
gives way to a series of enigmatic episodes and haunting observations.
There are two main characters: Cyclo (Le Van Loc) is a poor urban
teenager who scratches out a living operating a bicycle taxi in the
murderous city traffic; the Poet (Hong Kong star Tony Leung of Chungking
Express, Bullet In The Head, etc) is the son of an upper-class family
who has depressively drifted into pimping and fencing--wartime rackets
still thriving in the new Vietnam.
Images of appalling violence are played against backgrounds of banal,
everyday bustle--a buzzing flow of meaningless, insectlike activity.
Hung's vision may be dispiritingly bleak, but his filmmaking is vivid
and inventive. Each shot is distinguished by a particular quality of
lighting, framing, or texture that lifts it out of the ordinary and into
the realm of the strange, ravishing, and insinuating. "
--
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