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"Swept Away", from Tuna
Tuna's comments:
Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzurro mare
d'Agosto (1975) (Swept Away... by an unusual
destiny in the blue sea of August) was released
in the US as "Swept Away." It is the
film that put Writer/Director Lina Wertmüller on
the map in the US. Kind of an Italian Goldie
Hawn/Overboard, it is a variation on
Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. A rich bitch
democrat and her husband rent a yacht and crew to
cruise the Mediterranean, where she spends most
of her time belittling the crew and complaining.
She is especially harsh on one sailor who is a
leader in the Communist Party, and is a
dark-complected Sicilian. After she oversleeps
and forces him (against his advice) to take a
launch to meet her friends, the outboard dies,
and they are adrift. They finally land on an
uninhabited island, and find that he now has the
upper hand and enough of a grudge to use it. He
subjects her to physical, verbal and mental
abuse. Over time, she falls madly in love with
him.
There are strong
elements of class struggle and S&M in this
interesting film. The scenery is spectacular, and
the photography does it justice. I was totally
irritated by the beginning of the film, as
Mariangela Melato as the rich woman was totally
obnoxious. By the time it was over, I liked it a
lot. The performance by Giancarlo Giannini was
first rate.
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Mariangela Melato (no
nudity in the first three) (1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10, 11, 12)
"How The
West Was Won", from Tuna
Part of the famed
Cinerama experiment, which involved three
simultaneous projectors to produce a wrap-around
effect, seven channel sound, and a film quality
comparable to IMAX. One chapter of the film was
directed by the legendary John Ford, and the film
starred just about every big star of the day -
Widmark, The Duke, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart,
Gregory Peck, and Spencer Tracy. It also factored
in every great character actor they could find
from Walter Brennan to Russ Tamblyn, from Lee van
Cleef to a young Harry Dean Stanton. The scope of
the movie is the Western expansion of the usa,
and the running time is a million minutes. I
don't know exactly, the IMDb says 165 minutes,
but that doesn't sound right for the theatrical
release, because they originally showed it with
two intermissions!
So, of course, it is a
must see. BUT DON'T BUY IT. The DVD is a horror.
They haven't figured out how to stitch together
the three separate images on a flat screen to
make the thing viewable.
By the way, don't expect
the thing to be politically correct by today's
standards. Its portrayal of the native Americans
is consistent with the viewpoint of its own
times, and it will sound ugly to our more
sensitized ears. Furthermore it portrays the
often greedy Eurocentric westward expansion from
a one dimensional perspective, ignoring the
racism, genocide, treaty-breaking and
exploitation that went with it. So, it's not a
real brainy movie, but a sweeping classic
nonetheless, as much for what it tells you about
1965 as 1865.
By the way, if you live
near or pass through Dayton, Ohio, you can still
see this and a few other movies and shorts in
Cinerama at the world's last remaining Cinerama
theater.
If you are a film buff,
I recommend that you read every word of this analysis of Cinerama with
some reference to this film.
By the way, Debbie
Reynolds doesn't get naked. Sorry
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Debbie Reynolds (1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10, 11)
"Slave
Girls from Beyond Infinity", from Johnny Web
It's a shame that they
don't teach Physics in Slave Girl Training. They
went to all the trouble to locate beyond
infinity, and completely forgot about the
expanding universe. Now all of a sudden they are
well within infinity, their once-empty
neighborhood full of shopping malls, railroad
tracks, and foreign families. The only good news:
they are now within Domino's delivery zone.
I love one line in this
movie. Two girls walk into something that looks
like a temple. One asks where they are. the other
says "I don't know, but I have a feeling
that all the laws of time and space no longer
apply". At the moment she says that, there
is nothing strange at all about the place except
a little fog, and she is standing flat on the
ground, indicating that at least one of the laws
of space - the one involving a little thing I
like to call gravity - seems to be functioning
quite normally. Hell of a hunch!
I'm sick of talking
about this movie, so here are three great links: Badmovie.org has an entire
mini-site dedicated to this film, including
stills, film clips, and .wav files highlighting
the silliest moments, and plenty of fun comments. The B Movie Guide has a very
lengthy summary and commentary Here's a guy who caught and
demonstrated a very silly loophole in the logic
of an escape scene.
Elizabeth Kaitan
(actually listed in the credits as Elizabeth
"Cayton") (1,
2,
3,
4,
5)
Brinke Stevens Cindy Beal
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