| Collier White | Those two years make all the difference. Turning 49 this year, The Boys in the Band is a work that has straddled Stonewall for its entire life. You might be surprised at how fresh she sounds. You’ll want to rush out and see it before it’s… Continue reading
Peter Fonda’s Idaho Transfer is a strange and inventive little film that has gained something of a cult following over the years, though it remains stubbornly elusive. The Trylon, working with the Minnesota Historical Society, has gotten hold of the only known print of the film, making this something of… Continue reading
Review by Elizabeth Kingsley, from the film blog And You Call Yourself a Scientist! Reprinted by permission. I love Westworld. I want to state that quite plainly at the outset because, while I do love it, I also have a lot of very serious reservations about it. This was the first film directed… Continue reading
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” — L.P. Hartley The 1985 depicted in Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future is as distant to us now as 1955 was to Marty McFly, the protagonist of this now-classic time-travel comedy. Looking back, the juxtaposed Eisenhower and Reagan eras of 1955 and 1985 seem to… Continue reading
Review by Trylon lightcycle racer Aaron Vehling The original Tron, released in 1982, and starring Jeff Bridges and David Warner, is wholly of that era and yet it feels timeless. Some of that is the perpetual 80s nostalgia we’ve been living in for a good eight years (and codified in… Continue reading
Much is made of the fact that Ralph Bakshi’s first two animated features — Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic — received the “X” rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. What’s really remarkable, though, is that the “X” rating existed at all. Before the early 1970s, not only… Continue reading
Review by the Trylon’s grizzled war veteran Ben Schmidt Over the course of the Trylon’s “Jeff Bridges Abides” series, the Bridges I’ve grown to know and love is not the Jeff Bridges that showed up for work on the set of Cutter’s Way. Here, playing low-rent playboy Richard Bone, Bridges… Continue reading
Cool World is Ralph Bakshi’s attempt to reverse-engineer Who Framed Roger Rabbit into something that fits the seedy urban environments that were on display in Heavy Traffic and Fritz the Cat. At the same time he takes the opportunity to indulge in his own pet obsessions. It won’t surprise anyone… Continue reading
Review by Trylon safecracker Ben Schmidt A preacher (Clint Eastwood) runs through a vast Montana wheat field. Behind him another man in dark glasses gives chase, trying to kill the preacher with a pistol. This goes on for a while until the preacher reaches a road and tries to flag… Continue reading
Review by Trylon rotoscopist Maria Gomez Ralph Bakshi’s 1981 cult classic film American Pop a timeless story of one Russian family and their history of American music told through four generations. The story begins with Zalmie coming to America with his mother in the late 19th century as Russian immigrants…. Continue reading
Review by Trylon southpaw Ben Schmidt It’s late after fight night. The crowds and most of the staff of this VFW (or dilapidated theater or wherever we’re at) have all gone home. Four young boxers sit around a table, mere feet from the ring where hours before they each took… Continue reading
Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards may not be the animator’s best film, but it’s arguably his most ambitious. The movie takes place millions of years after a nuclear war has destroyed virtually all life on Earth. From the ashes an anti-technological utopia has emerged, led by gentle fairies and elves, and other… Continue reading
Review by Trylon rural diegeticist Ben Schmidt There’s a moment in The Last Picture Show where a young man named Sonny hops into his old, busted-up truck and drives it out of town. It’s late at night. And as Sonny rolls down Main Street, he looks through the windows of… Continue reading
Review by Trylon contract assassin Ben Schmidt The Killer isn’t the only killer in The Killer. This ‘89 entry into John Woo’s filmography also features a tough cop who plays by his own rules, and a washed-up Triad who serves as the Killer’s mentor and friend. But as… Continue reading
One one level, Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike is the baldest sort of early Soviet propaganda. The villains are cigar-chomping, top-hatted Capitalists who own a factory in Tsarist Russia, ca. 1903, men who laugh heartily over the money they make exploiting the workers. The factory owners’ despicable henchmen (who have nicknames like… Continue reading
Review by Trylon senior railroad bandit Thorn Chen The outlaw Zhang Muzhi (played by the director, Jiang Wen) arrives in town, impersonating its mayor. In order to get his way, he has to oust the incumbent warlord, the villainous opium merchant and human trafficker Huang Siliang (Chow Yun-fat), who currently… Continue reading
Review by Trylon volunteer Maria Gomez Lush green backgrounds, descending waterfalls, and robust mountains provide the backdrop for Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The film stars Chow-Yun Fat in his first martial arts film as Li Mu Bai and Michelle Yeoh as Yu Shu Lien. Long time respected friends,… Continue reading
In Walter Hill’s stylized and slightly surreal cult hit The Warriors, the street gangs of New York dress in matching theme outfits, as though they are all British pop groups from the 1960s. There are the Baseball Furies (heavy face paint and pinstriped uniforms); the High-Hats (mimes, basically); the Lizzies… Continue reading
Hard Boiled was the last Asian crime drama John Woo made before he decamped to Hollywood and began turning out profitable but ultimately forgettable fare like Broken Arrow and Face Off. Woo’s American films suffered without their distinctive Hong Kong backdrop; and also suffered for the lack of his go-to… Continue reading
From the moment you read its title on a theater marquee, it’s clear that EARTH VERSUS THE FLYING SAUCERS is the kind of movie that means business. This economical little thriller imagines aliens from a dying solar system attempting to conquer our planet, and they are not the sort of… Continue reading
In an unspecified future, a number of planets have been discovered that harbor life that closely resembles that on Earth. One of these worlds is Arkanar, muddling through a period of history that resembles Medieval Europe. 30 scientists infiltrate the population and observe the planet’s technological and sociological progress. But… Continue reading
Tucked away on an obscure corner of the Federal Broadcasting Company is a small research department run by Bunny Watson (Katherine Hepburn). Bunny and her colleagues Peg (Joan Blondell), Sylvia (Dina Merrill) and Ruthie (Sue Randall) answer all manner of arcane questions submitted to them from throughout the building, and their encyclopedic knowledge… Continue reading
Women spent much of the 1970s insisting on their right to occupy the workplace on the same terms as men, but by the end of the decade things had stalled. While some career women were able to move beyond the secretarial pool and the switchboard, the barriers were still imposing: the… Continue reading
We like to think of documentaries in terms of their utility: they deal in the real and the quantifiable. Even the ones that tell a story do so in a fairly prosaic way. But Jessica Oreck’s remarkable The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga is an elliptical meditation on myths, dreams and the fears… Continue reading
Review by Trylon hall of mirrors designer Thorn Chen Or how about we try “When you give a picnic, it’s a picnic”? The Lady from Shanghai is as surreal as one-liners like these make it sound. Welles is at his strangest and his most brilliant when spins this hallucinatory noir… Continue reading
The shortest and bloodiest of Shakespeare’s plays got the Hollywood treatment a number of times over the years, but Macbeth never so closely resembled a horror film as it does in this 1948 production. Welles, wild-eyed and brooding, is brilliant as the nobleman told by three witches that he is… Continue reading
Review by Trylon chief of police David Berglund So much is made of the famed tracking shot that opens Touch of Evil that it is tempting to think it is remembered because of this incredible opening salvo. Yet, taken on its own the shot is largely a gimmick – three… Continue reading
Review by Trylon volunteer David Berglund From the moment of his film debut, it was clear that Orson Welles had an innate understanding of the power of cinema and a firm grasp of its unique language. His films were never conventional, instead drawing power from visual risks and unmatched innovation…. Continue reading
After the spectacular flame-out of his RKO contract, Orson Welles had acquired a reputation — somewhat unfairly, it must be said — as a director whose films ran wildly over budget before tanking at the box office. As if that weren’t bad enough, his unfinished project It’s All True raised further… Continue reading
When people consider the European phase of Orson Welle’s career, they might think of Othello, or his great, unfinished Don Quixote or even the eccentric, almost unwatchable Viva Italia. But the most representative of his movies from this era was Mr. Arkadin, released in Europe as Confidential Report: it is… Continue reading
Review by Trylon volunteer Dave Berglund There is perhaps no greater real-life villain in film history than the shortsighted idiot at RKO who made the decision to destroy Orson Welles’s original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons. Now, to be clear, RKO had a justified business incentive to edit the film… Continue reading
Review by practicing zoologist Thorn Chen Here’s something better and a bit more terrifying than CGI monsters: the screen flashes red when Marnie, the female lead played by Tippi Hedren, sees a bouquet of red flowers in a vase. From there on, your muscles tighten every time you see a… Continue reading
Review by Trylon volunteer Peter Schilling How I wish that viewers new to Orson Welles’ masterpiece, Citizen Kane, could see it without ever having heard that it was “the Greatest Film Ever Made”, as I had in my youth. In a story I’ve undoubtedly shared way too many times, I… Continue reading
Review by Trylon volunteer Dave Berglund In the movies, first impressions are sacrosanct. Young lovers can throw their entire lives into turmoil to pursue with abandon someone they just met and we as viewers are so accustomed to this that we many times approvingly nod along without a second thought…. Continue reading
Our Wachowski series wraps up Monday and Tuesday with the filmmaking duo’s most controversial effort, 2008’s Speed Racer. Audiences and critics alike waved the black flag at it on its initial release, but over the years it’s gained a small but vocal group of defenders. To understand Speed Racer… Continue reading
Back in the 1990s a VHS copy of Volker Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum kicked around the foreign film section of my local video store, but for the longest time I didn’t rent it. The picture on the box showed the film’s protagonist Oskar (David Bennant) banging on a drum and… Continue reading
Review by Trylon volunteer Caty Rent. Originally written as a graphic novel in 1988 by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta was translated for the screen in 2006 by the Wachowskis. Although the material differs and some of the characters change greatly, the film version still has… Continue reading
At first glance, Little Fugitive (1953) doesn’t look like much. It’s the story of a couple of latchkey kids in 1950s New York: Lenny and his 7-year-old kid brother Joey. When their mother needs to visit a sick relative overnight, Lenny is left in charge. But he’s really too young to take… Continue reading
The Wachowski’s debut feature Bound ducked in and out of theaters pretty quickly back in 1996, but it’s one of those movies that couldn’t remain obscure for long. People kept talking about it. It was sleek and confident and shimmering with the distinctive visual smarts and storytelling élan that would… Continue reading
Review by Tyrell Corporation prototype Aaron Vehling I was drinking at a bar in my neighborhood one night when a woman who might be a highly sophisticated, genetically engineered cyborg (no spoilers) took my IPA out of my hand, drank some of it, and then asked if she could have… Continue reading
