Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Kinky Camp 2 this Friday 8/31

Summer camp ain’t over yet...and the midnight movie monkey business has just begun!

Friday 8/31 “Kinky Camp 2” at Monkey Town in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

http://www.monkeytownhq.com/contactinfo.html

Start your Labor Day weekend off right with a round of “Mixed Doubles”:

Score

“A highly entertaining sexual roundelay, really a sex farce based on a play originally set in Queens, New York. The action was moved to the once pristine, now undoubtedly destroyed Yugoslavian coastline, standing in for the French Riviera. (As Metzger has said, "Who wants to see sex in Queens?") Presented as a fairy tale, the film shows sophisticates Elvira (Claire Wilbur) and Jack (Gerald Grant) attempting to seduce an allegedly naïve couple -- Eddie (Cal Culver, aka the late gay porn star Casey Donovan) and Betsy (Lynn Lowry) -- in an elaborate series of sex games.”
- Images: The Films of Radley Metzger

Lord Love A Duck

“The weirdest sex scene on record anywhere has Barbara (Tuesday Weld) shopping for sweaters with her wildly incestuous dad, played by Max Showalter. His uncontrollable laughter sounds almost exactly like Warner cartoon voice artist Mel Blanc. Weld goes totally orgasmic in dizzy Dutch angles while Max distorts his face like the sex-mad playboys of Metropolis. The scene has to be seen to be believed, especially Max's laughing and Weld's squealing. Weld recites the names of the various cashmere colors: Grape Yum Yum! Pink Put-On! Papaya Surprise! Periwinkle Pussycat!”
- DVD Savant

Come one, come all, come campy!

Monday, August 13, 2007

A Midsummer Must-See

Finally someone got it – and for the first time ever I was left doubled over in laughter by a staging of a Shakespeare comedy. With the latest offering from The Public Theater’s annual Bard-fest in Central Park, director Daniel Sullivan has accomplished the enormous task of translating the “feeling” of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – Victorian times’ equivalent of Hollywood’s summer tent-pole blockbuster – to modern audiences. From Ann Hould-Ward’s costumes (gothic creations that on the child actor fairies conjure up a gorgeous creepiness that would do Tim Burton proud) to the awe-inspiring scenic and lighting design by Eugene Lee and Michael Chybowski, respectively, to the finely tuned veteran cast of which Martha Plimpton and Tim Blake Nelson only serve to remind us that the busiest character actors in film owe their chops to the stage. (And Plimpton and Nelson are often upstaged by equally able players like Mireille Enos as Hermia and Jay O. Sanders as Nick Bottom.) But perhaps best of all, the play-within-a-play performed by the “rude mechanicals” at the happy end channels all the sheer idiocy and delight of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the combination of lowbrow sight gags and highbrow wit taken to the extreme and then beyond, to the point of an utter discomfort that can only be released through hysterical laughter. Which makes total sense. After all, you can’t get more British than Shakespeare and Monty Python. Finally American theater has a director savvy enough to incorporate a culture, not just update with a slice of apple pie.

Monday, August 6, 2007

The Bergman Paradox

Ingmar Bergman’s films have been described alternately as “small” psychodramas writ large on screen to masterpieces tackling the “big” questions of life, reducing them to screen size. His movies could encompass two such disparate ideas only if religion, relationships, neuroses, life, death, fear, grand theories and tiny uncertainties were all one and the same. So this is the case, the very definition of art.