Film School Rejects » Deviant Cinema

Repo! The Genetic Opera: New Photos and a Road Tour

Neil Miller — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 06:00:53 +0000

Had our own Adam Sweeney not just given Repo! The Genetic Opera such a glowing review from Fantastic Fest this morning, I probably would have let this little piece of news slip by. In fact, the following passage from Adam’s review alone has me more than interested in this rock opera:

In an age of cookie cutter films not worth our time, Repo! is a refreshing story that takes risks and reminds us what it’s like to, gasp, have a good time at the movies! Outlandish, outrageous, and above all things outstanding, it’s time for Repo! The Genetic Opera to step out of the shadows and into the spotlight.

With that in mind, I was excited to see that the folks behind Repo! are taking it on tour, bringing it to seven different cities across the country starting November 10th. With the mantra “It’s Not Just a Movie… It’s An Event!” it appears that they are trying to capture the same sort of audience that still packs midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show some 30+ years after its release. More details will be released via the tour’s website RepoRoadTour.com over the coming weeks, so if you live near Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Atlanta or Orlando, be sure to stay tuned. For the rest of us, Repo! could be headed to limited release sometime in the winter months, but no date is set as of yet.

In conjunction with the Road Tour announcement, Lionsgate has also released some new stills from the film, which can be seen in the gallery below.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno Red Band Trailer Returns

Neil Miller — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:59:36 +0000

Another red band trailer for Kevin Smith’s upcoming film Zack and Miri Make a Porno has arrived, and this time it doesn’t appear that it will be taken down by the MPAA. As you will remember, we showed you the first teaser back at the end of May. As well, there was that disappointing situation surrounding the first red band trailer. But now, thanks to Mr. Smith, the MPAA and AskMen.com, we have a brand new trailer full of all the “fucks” that we have come to expect from the View Askew crew. And as you will see below, this one looks to be a winner.

[See post to watch Flash video]

You have to love that Justin Long scene at the beginning. I will never think of Glengarry Glen Ross the same way again. As for the movie overall, my first impression is very good. This is a top-notch comedic cast combined with Kevin Smith returning to the absurd humor that has made him successful. I can’t say that there are too many movies over the course of the next few months that I am looking forward to more.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is scheduled to hit theaters on October 31st. It stars Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Robinson, Katie Morgan, Traci Lords, Jeff Anderson, Justin Long and Jason Mewes.

What do you think of the new Zack and Miri red band trailer?

Be Really Offended, Check Out ‘Lenny’

Maggie Van Ostrand — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:22:31 +0000

In honor of the late George Carlin’s Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV, FSR recommends 1974’s Lenny, the tragedy of comedian-satirist Lenny Bruce, who heavily influenced Carlin, Pryor, and Woody.

Dustin Hoffman is brilliant in his intense portrayal of upcoming comic Lenny Bruce, who burns with lust for Honey Harlow, stripper-junkie and enforced-lesbian fantasy woman who shimmies, strips, and shakes her “tits and ass” into his being. A punishing marriage to Honey dims neither his ardor nor his zeal to share drugs with her. With a cherubic face, appealing lisp, and steamy sensuality, one-time Vegas showgirl Valerie Perrine plays Honey with gay abandon.

Lenny is a dark biopic which partly explains Oscar-winning director Bob Fosse’s choice of black and white film. From Lenny’s start in small family Catskill resorts to big-city clubs, Fosse focuses Cassavetes-like extreme close-ups to great effect. It’s like being stoned at an anarchist’s convention in Andy Warhol’s studio. Transvestites, burned-out comics, musicians, and strippers, aided by Ralph Burns’s muted original jazz score, shine a bleak light on seedy off-stage life. Albert Goldman, one of Lenny Bruce’s biographers and a onetime film critic, has described Lenny as worshipping “the gods of Spontaneity, Candor and Free Association” who “fancied himself an oral jazzman.” Miles Davis lends musical authenticity to the atmosphere.

For a few years in the sixties, Lenny Bruce was famous for rapid-patter social commentary, fueled by his favorite drug, methadrine. His mouth hardly kept up with his mind’s frenetic pace. Honey and Lenny descended into an inferno of sex binges and heroin-sniffing marathons. They lived in a world of encroaching darkness. Then things worsened.

He endured a series of arrests for possession, and using “obscene” language onstage. He believed the real obscenities were not words, but the Kennedy assassination and Viet Nam. Arrests in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Philadelphia, changed him from a bright, articulate, politically hip satirist, into a mumbling addict discussing little else onstage except his legal troubles. Fans found him boring.

Lenny’s real enemy wasn’t the cops who kept arresting him, but the era in which he came to prominence. At 40, drugs finally killed him. Bruce’s efforts to liberate words from categories of “good” and “bad” were thwarted by a morally inhibited public.

Lenny publicly flaunted the words “fuck” and “cocksucker” onstage. His believed frequent use of such words would render them impotent. He went further than we go now, trashing his audience with racial and religious epithets so politically incorrect that today, an instant apology would be demanded.

Lenny is filmed as a sparce documentary, using an interview structure, (”a variation on the Citizen Kane format in which characters are questioned about the protagonist”*) with Honey, Lenny’s possessive mom Sally, and his agent, Artie Silver, with quick cuts between stage performances and off-stage self-destructive behavior.

Fosse’s use of painful pauses in Lenny’s last performance causes us to shift with discomfort in our seats, just as did his real audience — before they started to walk out.

After the cops took away his cabaret card and the high cost of lawyers drove Lenny into bankruptcy, he disastrously represented himself in court. In one scene, he pitifully begs the judge, “Don’t take away my words. Please don’t take away my words!”

Critics felt that Bruce’s involvement with drugs and sex was played down in the film, but he had only been dead eight years, and Honey, daughter Kitty, and Sally, were all alive and kicking. Still, Fosse manages to convey an obsessed performer’s attempts to express himself to a world that simply didn’t get it.

Memorable Lines

“‘Fuck you.’ Never understood that insult, because fucking someone is actually really pleasant. If we’re trying to be mean, we should say ‘unfuck you!’”

“Did you know that Eleanor Roosevelt gave Lou Gehrig the clap?”

Some of Lenny’s best quotes (understandably) didn’t make it into the movie, which began with an X rating. One of them is “If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”

Trivia

“I rode with him in a taxi once, only for a mile and a half. Seemed like it took a couple of months” -Bob Dylan

The film’s producer, Marvin Worth, was Lenny Bruce’s first manager.

Contenders for the title role included Cliff Gorman who originated the role on Broadway, and Al Pacino.

Dustin Hoffman told the Village Voice, “I didn’t want to do the film. It was too hairy, too tender ground, too soon. People I’d talk to would suddenly start crying. It was important, they’d tell me, to catch the dichotomy that was Lenny. On stage, he was a tiger. In real life, he was agreeable, generous to a fault; people loved being with him, until just before his death when he got demonical. With such strong emotions at stake, I didn’t want to jump into it.”

Contenders for the role of Honey included Ann-Margret who turned it down due to the excessive nudity which Fosse said was absolutely necessary.

Nominated for six Oscars (Hoffman, Perrine, Fosse, Best Picture, Screenplay, and Cinematography/Bruce Surtees), it didn’t win any.

During a scene in which Lenny pulls the bed sheet off a titillating naked Honey, Perrine confessed she had a little surprise for Hoffman. “He couldn’t believe his eyes,” she told Viva in 1975. “I had gotten a big springy rubber cock from the prop department and tucked it right between my legs — and the minute the sheet was off, it sprang up and started going boing! boing! boing! That really cracked Dustin up.”

******************************************

*Razzle Dazzle: the Life and Work of Bob Fosse, by Kevin Boyd Grubb

Zack and Miri Make the World’s First R-Rated Porno

Neil Miller — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 22:36:24 +0000

The official word is coming in today that director Kevin Smith has won an appeal with the MPAA to lower the rating of his upcoming film Zack and Miri Make a Porno from NC-17 to R. Not that it makes any difference to me, as I am of age to see both types of films, but as you may very well know, it is difficult to distribute an NC-17 flick. Then again Zack and Miri is a Weinstein Company property, and they seem to have trouble distributing just about any type of film.

Ultimately this is a win for youngens whose parents are okay with them seeing depraved, potentially raunchy and unexpectedly intelligent things on the big screen. It is also a huge victory for Kevin Smith, whose work deserves to be seen by as many people (young or old) as possible.

The MPAA gave no official reason for granting the R rating, but we can only assume that they finally realized that the film was not, in fact, a porno as the title states. It is a somewhat romantic comedy about two roommates, played by Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks, who decide to make a homemade porn film in order to dig themselves out of debt. What isn’t R-rated about that?

Early reports that I’ve heard say that the film is ridiculously funny and that Seth Rogen once again delivers the goods. Alright, that sounded a little too sexual. I am done with this article. Leave your thoughts, hopes, dreams and fantasies in the comment area below.

Behold the Raunchy Goodness of the Choke Red Band Trailer

Neil Miller — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:20:43 +0000

Devious, sexy and fun — those were the best words I could come up with in January at the Sundance Film Festival after seeing the film adaptaion of Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke. The film stars the infinitely talented Sam Rockwell as Victor, a sex-addicted Colonial tour guide trying to get a grip on his life as his mother’s health fades. It is, as advertised, fun, devious, sexy and in many ways very raunchy — all of the things that fans have come to know and love from Palahniuk. To illustrate the raunch, Fox Searchlight has released the following red band trailer, which is about as NSFW as they come.

Watch the red band trailer for Choke:

Unfortunately this trailer was deemed too hot for the interwebs. We have been asked to take it down.

The film marks the directorial debut of actor Clark Gregg, who has starred in films such as Clear and Present Danger, Magnolia and was most recently seen as SHIELD Agent Phil Coulson in Iron Man. Along with Rockwell, the film features the very talented Kelly Macdonald, Anjelica Huston and Brad William Henke. It is scheduled for release on September 26, 2008.

For more on Choke, visit the film’s official website ChokeOnThis.net or read my review from Sundance.

Film School Rejects » Deviant Cinema

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