| DESERT ISLAND MOVIES |
       
DESERT ISLAND MOVIES
Each week, I Luv Video will present nationally-renowned filmmakers, famous musicians, local celebs &
self-styled smarties weighing in with their lists of FIVE MOVIES they'd require to live out the rest of their natural lives on a technologically advanced -- but strangely deserted -- island. We'll present two or three lists a week until we run out of victims...
Writer/Troublemaker
Austin music writer & rabble-rouser Michael Corcoran began penning a confrontational music column in the Austin Chronicle in the early 80s & was voted "The Worst Thing to Happen to Austin Music," a mantle he wore with some measure of pride. His rock reportage & criticism in SPIN magazine during the mid- to late-80s was some of the finest rock writing to come out of that rather blase decade & his work has repeatedly been reprinted in Da Capo Press' venerable Best Music Writing anthologies, next to Nick Tosches, Greil Marcus, Richard Meltzer, Chuck Klosterman & Lenny Kaye. His often cranky opinions can now be unfairly excoriated in the Austin American-Statesman & on their website Austin360.com.
A family is senselessly slaughtered and you can’t wait to see vengeance take Dick and Perry, a couple of worthless ex-cons trying to impress each other. By the end of the film, however, you come to see that the title refers as much to the state of Kansas as the Clutter family killers. In this retro-doc with acting (and Ray Brown’s sinister bass) Brooks films most scenes, including the murders, in the exact places where they occurred.
Manhattan is way overrated and Annie Hall isn’t as funny the second and third time. This is Woody’s sad and funny masterpiece.
I luv documentaries and could’ve just as easily cited “The Times of Harvey Milk” and “The Thin Blue Line.” This chronicle of “The Rumble in the Jungle” features not only a great Ali/ Foreman fight, which ends in a huge upset, but an undercard of race in America, played out in Africa.
“It was a stitch-up.” The smartest, funniest comedy ever on TV is wrapped up two years later by this tag-on, which is the opposite of a letdown.
Ricky’s mallaprops and Julian’s surgically-attached rum and coke are priceless, and Bubbles grows surprising dimensions, but this hilarious Canadian series stumbles into dumb genius territory when trailer park supervisor Leahy starts hitting the bottle so hard he makes Foster Brooks look like Joe Six-Pack. Imagine if John Waters, a native of Baltimore, Nova Scotia, set out to make the ultimate doper comedy.
Claudia Hollern
Set Dresser/Costume Designer
Austinite Claudia Hollern is a costumer for the critically-lauded, Austin-based TV series Friday Night Lights which is currently running its third season exclusively on DirecTV & will premiere on NBC in February. Her other credits include BBC's Wire in the Blood, MTV's Human Giants & the recent Tim McCanlies (Secondhand Lions, Smallville, Iron Giant) film, The 2 Bobs. In addition, Claudia can occasionally be spotted dancing around in assorted strange outfits to Ethel Merman's disco album at Vulcan Video.
Allow me to preface; pontificate, really
Solely on my part, this list is quite arbitrary and probably would not be the same list I would produce tomorrow, but hey, since it's still today, in no particular order here you go:
It's just such an interesting take on being a bourgey wifey.
This movie blew my mind the first time I saw it. It's such an out there plot mixed with that perfect Altman background-noise-amplified-thing.
Woody Allen, Peters Sellers and O’Toole, Ursula Andress, Romy Schneider, and Capucine, with Burt Bacharach songs. Come on, it's so silly, campy, pre-turmoil sixties I have to love it.
It was my first venture into Italian Horror. The production value is so amazing, and then it also turns out to be such a gory movie. OMG. And I love the way Argento makes the actors almost tertiary after production values and plot. So often in movies, the over-the-top actors rob the movie of both. However, Argento makes them more like elaborate props, even dubbing their voices if he decides to.
Such a perfectly, beautifully shot, charming movie, with farting as a huge plotline, Brilliant, right?
Days of Heaven
Dazed and Confused
Mark Tidrick Editor, True Crime Magazine Obsessive Clevelander
Most days Mark Tidrick spends trying desperately to make modern Cleveland appreciate its legendary proto-punk heritage, the days when the members of Pere Ubu, The Cramps, Mirrors, The Dead Boys, Electric Eels & Rocket From the Tombs hunched through that city's industrial rust belt hellscape looking for some scraps of transcendence. He's a writer, a musician, a record & film know-it-all & the very prototype of a Cleveland plain-dealer. As if that weren't cool enough, his two kids are named Dashiell & Lillian. Sheesh. 1. City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
Boris Karloff, Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey and Charlie Chaplin...When I think of them I go back to a time filled with grilled cheese sandwiches on homemade bread, Halloween sound effects records and hours spent in front of a TV that spewed glorious old films at the oddest of late hours. I always felt so sorry for Chaplin’s character in City Lights. He sacrifices everything for a blind woman who thinks he is someone else. It is the ending of it that makes everything better. Maybe one of the most simple, the most beautiful endings of any film ever made.
When Frank Capra looked upon the great unwashed he saw a mass of individuals capable of grandness. I wonder what he would think about the quaking lot of individuals who are now wandering the streets of Cleveland, Ohio. Maybe if he was alive today he would be helming darker films? Then again, this film IS dark. It is filled with moments of despair, poverty, greed and a suicide attempt. I put it on every year and have a good cry. I cry not only over the touching ending, but I cry for all the mistakes I made in the past. I think I have somehow avoided years on a therapist’s couch thanks to the power of this film.
Thanks to the popularity of L.A. Confidential, the studios opened up their vaults (in the late 90s) and brought the darkness out. I was finally able to get my hands on films I had only read about. This was one of those films. The seething violence of Dan Duryea, the lost look in Burt Lancaster’s eyes, the terrible beauty of Yvonne De Carlo, the gas masks, the cold gun shots veiled in smoke and an ending as grim as something made in the 70s. This film haunted my cranium for years.
I saw this film four times in the theatre. I was turned on to 45 Grave, The Flesh Eaters, the solo work of Roky Erickson and a killer non-LP Cramps number via the film's great soundtrack. Horror and Comedy (both drenched in blood) never looked better. James Karen’s (not to mention Clu Gulager’s) performance made me want to start a fan club for him. Of course, there is Linnea Quigley...Her nude dance in the cemetery certainly pushed all the buttons on my sixteen year old brain. Twenty odd years later and my buttons are still being pushed by this one.
I can’t get enough of Peter Lorre. There are only a few other film (see M, Mad Love and the Mr. Moto films) where he is given as much of chance to work some real dark magic acting-wise. His performance is the backbone of this potent little drama that deftly straddles the line between film noir and horror. Lorre plays a hopeful immigrant all hopped-up on the promise of making it in America. Things do not go well for him after his face is disfigured in a fire. He slowly drifts into a life of crime becoming quite the successful crime lord. He wears a lifeless mask to hide his scarred face. The mask symbolizes a lot of things about America then and now. Is not the face of crime unknowable? Maybe we should start trying to see the faces behind the “masks” and try to understand what led them to crime...ho hum. Director Robert Florey was at his cynical best when he trafficked in horror, crime and melodrama. Check out his work!
More Desert Island Movies:
DESERT ISLAND MOVIES - September 15, 2008 - Jad Fair, Angela Doetsch, Ben White & Zack Carlson
DESERT ISLAND MOVIES - September 7, 2008 - Allison Anders, Max Dropout, Harvey Smith DESERT ISLAND MOVIES - September 3, 2008 - Gerard Cosloy, Clark Walker
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