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!

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.

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.

Kinky Camp Night

Lisa of CineKink really outdid herself with the kinky campy shorts last night. I fell asleep laughing my ass off!

This music video is a MUST-SEE:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mooywzkwL38

(That is, if you’re into cheesy 80s, well...if Toni Basil had sung about spanking instead of "Mickey" this would be it!)

Also loved the film of four deadpan actors sitting around a table doing a David Mamet-like reading of a porn script. Oh, and Santa Claus Pez dispensers screwing is one hard kink to top!

Stay tuned for more Monkey Town midnight movie madness in August.

More Myra!

Calling all wet dreamers...

I've been asked to curate some perverted midnight madness on Thursday July 26th, so please join my co-host Lisa Vandever and me for a night of celluloid debauchery at the fabulous Monkey Town in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

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

Lisa will be warming us up with shorts from her famous Cinekink Film Festival

http://cinekink.com/blog/2007/07/take-me-to-monkey-town.html

Followed by a screening of the greatest underrated camp classic of all time, yes - Gore Vidal's "Myra Breckinridge"!!

Mark your calendars. Raquel Welch wielding a strap-on. Need I say more?

Oh, Myra!

If “Myra Breckinridge” the film had been a Broadway musical first, I’ve no doubt it would have gone down in midnight movie history right alongside “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Raquel Welch’s Miss Myra is the precursor to Tim Curry’s Frankenfurter, with both actors playing gender and sexually ambiguous characters seducing naïve young lovers with equal panache. “Myra Breckinridge” works on so many levels it’s hard to keep track, from the film critic Rex Reed playing film critic Myron Breckinridge to “Miss” Mae West – the ultimate gay man in a woman’s body, perhaps the first transgender superstar – as a stud collecting Hollywood agent, of course. That Rex and Raquel, playing opposite sides of the same protagonist, flow easily, interchangeably, from one setup to the next, sometimes even playing the same scene together is a lovely symbolic nod to the desire to become one, be it with another person or with oneself. The classic movie clips commenting on the action like a Tinseltown, Greek chorus and the classic Miss West belting out numbers like “You Gotta Taste All The Fruit” are pure winking delight. The many critics who panned “Myra Breckinridge” decades ago when it was first released were as clueless as John Huston’s Buck Loner, for the film is nothing less than a brilliantly, thoughtfully, stupendously conceived work of art.

Inherit The Wind

The Broadway production of “Inherit The Wind”, which pits Christopher Plummer’s Tony-nominated performance of Henry Drummond up against Brian Dennehy’s critic-disappointing turn as Matthew Harrison Brady is a revelation. And that revelation has everything to do with the astonishingly profound – and unforgivably ignored – acting choices made by Mr. Dennehy. Unlike Fredric March, who took a far easier path in the film version by shaping Brady into a charismatic, Bible-thumping blowhard, Dennehy chooses to explore the infinite complexities of a man nearing the end of his life who suddenly finds himself questioning and doubting all that he’s ever believed in. An iconic man confronted with the realization that his time has come and gone, the fear that everything he stood for could very well be wrong. Faced with Plummer’s tour de force, Dennehy goes under it, not over the top – and it all makes complete sense! Only a religious man wrestling with his own conscience would rush to the aid of a preacher’s daughter, literally knocked down by her father for supporting her “blasphemous” colleague/paramour on trial. A man who with a brilliant lawyer’s rational mind would no doubt succumb to Drummond’s eloquently sound reasoning.

I have an enormous amount of respect for an actor who can take a panning from critics too simple to see the genius of his performance and not give a damn, just carry on with what he knows is right. Christopher Plummer’s Henry Drummond might have won on the side of truth, but Brian Dennehy’s portrayal of Matthew Harrison Brady is nothing short of truth incarnate.