CineFile Video

Turn up the volume and click here.

Here’s a photo essay of a recent night at Cinefile.

For a seven-month run (June ‘06-January ‘07), Cinefile friend Nate Thompson did a great, great soundtrack blog called 7 Black Notes. At the end of the seven months, Nate grew tired of Rapidshare deleting everything he’d posted, so he gave up the ghost, and now 7 Black Notes is no more — but — he’s graciously let us re-post some of our favorite soundtracks that he’d initially unleashed on the world. First from him is a three-volume Italian soundtrack compilation, called “Italian Blend”. Here’s what he originally had to say about it:

“Here’s a little project I’ve been tinkering with for a while, and it’s a bit different than past posts. Given the huge amount of great film music never commerically released in any format, I decided to cut together a series of suites of some outstanding titles that deserved some notice; here the spotlight turns on some of the great (well, in most cases) Italian composers whose work has often never gotten the credit it deserves. Taken from a variety of sources (video, M&E tracks, or whatever’s handy), these have been tweaked to sound as good as I can make ‘em; hopefully you’ll discover a few new gems in this three-part collection, entitled ‘Italian Blend’. Running times have also been included to give you an idea of how much music to expect.”

Italian Blend: Volume One
1. The Witches (Piero Piccioni) (10:41)
2. Images In A Convent (Nico Fidenco) (9:04)
3. Baba Yaga (Piero Umiliani) (2:16)
4. A Virgin Among The Living Dead (Bruno Nicolai) (12:42)
5. Queens Of Evil (Angelo Francesco Lavagnino) (9:34)
6. Knife Of Ice (Marcello Giombini) (2:56)
7. Burial Ground (Elsio Macuso & Burt Rexon) (3:00)
8. Death Smiles At Murder (Berto Pisano) (7:02)
9. A Blade In The Dark (Guido & Maurizio De Angelis) (5:26)
10. Beast With A Gun (Umberto Saila) (4:15)
11. Plot Of Fear (Daniele Patucchi) (2:59)
12. The Great Alligator (Stelvio Cipriani) (4:11)
13. Do You Like Hitchcock? (Pino Donaggio) (3:26)

Italian Blend: Volume Two
1. Eugenie De Sade (Bruno Nicolai) (8:27)
2. Footprints (Nicola Piovani) (8:51)
3. 2019: After The Fall Of New York (Guido & Maurizio De Angelis) (3:55)
4. A Whisper In The Dark (Pino Donaggio) (13:41)
5. Yellow Emanuelle (Nico Fidenco) (8:30)
6. Waves Of Lust (Marcello Giombini) (2:05)
7. Orgasmo Nero (Stelvio Cipriani) (15:42)
8. Caligula: The Untold Story (Claudio Maria Cordio) (2:08)
9. Patrick Still Lives (Berto Pisano) (2:37)
10. The Man From Deep River (Daniele Patucchi) (5:35)
11. Zeder (Riz Ortolani) (1:30)
12. Body Count (Claudio Simonetti) (1:57)

Italian Blend: Volume Three
1. Suspected Death Of A Minor (Luciano Michellini) (8:30)
2. House On The Edge Of The Park (Riz Ortolani) (4:06)
3. Strip Nude For Your Killer (Berto Pisano) (6:04)
4. The Pyjama Girl Case (Riz Ortolani) (7:18)
5. Nightmares Come At Night (Bruno Nicolai) (9:35)
6. The Lickerish Quartet (Stelvio Cipriani) (11:45)
7. Porno Holocaust (Nico Fidenco) (22:13)
8. Porno Shop On 7th Street (Bruno Biriaco) (9:27)
9. The Big Racket (Guido & Maurizio De Angelis) (6:11)

“Italian Blend”, Vol. 1 (ZIP file)
“Italian Blend”, Vol. 2 (ZIP file)
“Italian Blend”, Vol. 3 (ZIP file)

Here we have two recent films that both deal in depravity: “The Salton Sea” (2002) has Val Kilmer tumbling headlong into the world of meth addiction, and “Feed” (2005) has a “Silence of the Lambs”-like serial “feeder” force-feeding a fat woman chained to a bed while he feverishly masturbates.

The “Salton Sea” cover came first, but I honestly can’t figure out how the image is supposed to accurately reflect what the movie is about. “Feed” came way later, and therefore it’s possible that whoever designed the cover was very aware of “The Salton Sea” — but what’s missing from the “Feed” cover (from the American DVD release, at least) is that the tattooed guy’s left arm that reaches here out-of-frame is supposed to be holding a sandwich (the British DVD cover of the film shows it more clearly.) This is a more direct and effective way of visually presenting the theme of the film — but that’s not how Danger After Dark, the American home video distributor of the film, chose to present it. Looking at these two covers side by side, it’s hard to say whether or not it’s a simple rip-off case, although in the end it doesn’t matter, since both films are probably total shit anyway.

Verdict: undecided

“Flash Gordon”. One of our favorite sci-fi films, with one of the best soundtracks in the history of soundtracks, courtesy of Queen. It’s been out-of-print on DVD here in the U.S. for years now, but it’s still available in the U.K., complete with a director’s commentary track by Mike Hodges, who also helmed “Croupier” and the original “Get Carter.”

On the track, Hodges reveals that he took over for fellow British director Nic Roeg during pre-production, and that during the shooting of the film, basically he had absolutely no idea what he was doing, and was making everything up as he went along with the cast and crew day-by-day. Not exactly the kind of thing an uber-fan of a film wants to hear, but we’re still no less entertained by the film after having known this. And — we know this isn’t exactly music, but it’s better filed under the “Movie Music Archives” banner than the other categories we have going.

“Flash Gordon” Region 2 DVD commentary track - Mike Hodges, director (MP3)

name: Josh Fadem, Cinefile weekend shift
primary watching years: 1989-1996

“Don’t Tell Her It’s Me”: “Some movies I watched just because they were on. I never liked that Guttenberg movie — but I always enjoyed watching it, even though I never thought I would. I’d never recommend that one to anyone — his career was over at that point. If I reference [the movie], no one laughs. You know how when you mention ‘Police Academy’, someone will laugh at the mention of it, but if you mention ‘Don’t Tell Her It’s Me’ in an anecdote, no one knows what you’re talking about. I don’t know if HBO was regional, or if my friends and I were the only ones who caught it, but no one seems to have really seen the movie — as much as I have.” (Editor’s note: this film has recently been re-titled on an MGM DVD release as ‘The Boyfriend School’.)

“Moon Over Parador” & “Big Business”: “Two different movies that both have the main actors playing multiple characters. ‘Moon Over Parador’ was another one no one seems to have ever heard of.”

HBO: “My father would occasionally say ‘Okay, this month we don’t have the money for HBO’, so he’d cancel it, and then it would become a big deal to go over to my grandparents’ house, because they’d still have it. What would get me really excited was the HBO pre-movie bumper, the tracking shot through the town into the HBO logo in space. That fanfare was always really exciting, making me think ‘Oh, this is gonna be an exciting night watching a movie with my cousins at my grandparents’ house.’ Sometimes it wouldn’t be awesome, but it got me pumped up. ‘Feature Presentation’ were two big words I didn’t know as a kid, but HBO taught me…Stand-up comedy on HBO was another big thing. Any one of those specials HBO would show, I’d watch. The opening bumper for the stand-up specials in the late ’80s was equally as exciting as the HBO In Space. It was an insanely sped-up stop-motion thing, of a camera mounted on the hood of a car going through city streets.”

the “HBO Guide”: “I was obsessive about the HBO Guide. It was a big deal to me to get the new one at the beginning of every month. Kwik Trip is a conveinence store chain in the Midwest, and they carried the HBO Guide; around ‘89, I’d bug my mom every month to take me to get the new issue. I collected them too; I kept a stack for a year or two straight. I don’t know why you would collect such a thing — ‘Look, I got the one with ‘Awakenings’ on the cover!’ First sign of OCD. Of all the things to collect, that’s what I decided to collect? I still have them stacked up in a big box back home in Tulsa. The HBO Guide would have listings for both HBO and Cinemax. I didn’t have Cinemax, and I really wanted it. They had some more shittier-looking action movies, ones with hotter girls, dumb kung fu stuff. My friend and I would really be into karate movies. I remember him telling me that ‘Bolo Yeung rules!’ There was a period where I was really into anything with Bolo as the lead, or Billy Blanks, Cynthia Rothrock, Don ‘The Draon’ Wilson (who was always a real bore to me).”

the Encore channel: “Came out in ‘90 or ‘91, I remember. It sounded like the coolest channel, they had the gimmick of ‘They only show movies from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s,’ they weren’t going to show current stuff. I was most excited by the ’80s stuff, hoping I wouldn’t catch something ‘boring’ from the ’60s or ’70s, but occasionally I’d get suckered into older stuff, like ‘Butterflies Are Free’ with Goldie Hawn, or ‘Breezy’ with William Holden and some young girl. When Encore came around, I first started to say to myself ‘I’m a movie watcher. I like watching movies.’ I got disappointed around ‘96, when Encore just started showing everything, giving up on the original gimmick.”

’80s comedy actors: “There were a lot of actors who, because of the movies that played a lot on cable, I thought were bigger than they actually were in the long run: Ted Danson, Howie Mandel (who were both in ‘A Fine Mess’), Christopher Lloyd (who was in ‘Walk Like A Man’…with Howie Mandel), Tom Selleck, Shelley Long, Tom Hanks (who somehow stepped over and made it big. He’s a good actor, but could just as easily be where Ted Danson is now).” Didn’t Ted Danson have some recent long-running sitcom, though? “Before ‘Becker’, there was a big chuck of time where it seemed like he didn’t have anything. Every two years, it seemed like he’d only make an appearance on ‘Frasier’.”

other memories:
- Taxi Driver
- The Lady In White
- Teen Wolf
- The Gate
- Troll
- They Live
- “Three Stooges” shorts
- “Police Academy” movies
- Student Bodies
- Ruthless People
- Full Metal Jacket (”I always thought it was an easy-to-watch movie as a kid, before I had any sense of Stanley Kubrick as the director, as an important guy to watch. At the time, I just thought it was cool.”)

There’s too much for me to say about David Cronenberg’s 1982 film in the time I have today to get this off, so suffice it to say that it speaks to me in a way that few other sci-fi films do, or indeed any of his other films do. Howard Shore’s score for the film is a deeply integral part of why it all works: its liquid synthiness approximates orchestral dread very, very clearly. Shore’s work perfectly compliments James Woods’ descent into madness, the psychosexual tension between him and Debbie Harry, and Cronenberg’s thesis of the 20th century video image as “the retina of the mind’s eye”, as the character Prof. Brian O’ Blivion states in the film.

“Videodrome” soundtrack LP (ZIP file)

name: Philip Anderson, Cinefile owner
primary watching years: 1980-1983

“Hot Stuff”: “This was one of those movies where I hadn’t seen it in years and years, and upon seeing it again recently, it was fucking unbearable. As a kid, I was really taken by the idea of the camera shooting through a two-way mirror in order to catch crooks [in a pawn shop]. I thought that was a great idea for a movie. Dom Deluise and Jerry Reed made me laugh. They just seemed to be having a good time, and maybe that was what I was tapping into, despite the movie.”

“Mad Max”: “Before having cable in my mom’s place, I remember watching ‘Mad Max’ — but actually watching it, just kinda sorta seeing it on my neighbor’s TV next door. I was the next story up, I had a lofted bed and I could see their TV through the window. At that distance, their screen was postage-stamp sized. Now that I’m thinking about it, I’m not even sure that it was ‘Mad Max’. I probably saw the previews at the house of a friend who had cable, and I knew it was on, so that’s how I must’ve though that’s what they were watching.”

the HBO Guide: “Getting the HBO Guide was a real treat for me, because I could comb it over for R-rated movies, or any kind of horror film. Before cable, I would hear stories from friends of mine who did have cable — there’d be films everyone was talking about that I didn’t have access to, and somehow the imagining what the film was made it that much more elusive and exciting. ‘Halloween’ was one of those. Also, anything with an ‘N’ next to it in its synopsis would mean nudity. It made me sit through things I would’ve never watched otherwise. I saw ‘10′ quite a bit based on that, but I wasn’t interested in the film in the slightest; it was too adult for me. I’d sit through 30 minutes of Dudley Moore to see 3 seconds of Bo Derek’s breasts. That to me was a fair price to pay.”

“Alien”“: The cable vs. VHS memories are kinda hazy for me because I was one of the first people I knew to have a VCR. In 1980, my mom worked for a tobacco company in upstate New York, and she would bring back and forth from work a big top-loader from the office. The first movie my mom bought for me for the VCR was ‘Alien’, the original first Magnetic Video release of it. My mom must’ve paid $90 or something like that for it; I had no idea where she knew where to buy it, because it wasn’t common knowledge back then. I had fantasies of putting up a marquee on the roof of our condo’s garage. My bedroom was right over the pitch of the roof; I thought it a really cool idea to want to have a movie theater in my bedroom…I remember the very first time I wrote down a director’s name: Ridley Scott. I wrote it down on a little piece of Belair Cigarette stationary, and taped it to my refrigerator.”

other memories:
- Caddyshack
- Stripes
- National Lampoon’s Animal House
- The Thing
- Escape From New York
- The Private Eyes

final thoughts: “Looking back, cable TV played a larger role than I cared to admit in deciding to live with my mom after my parents’ divorce. My dad didn’t have cable and so it was the only way you I could get to see the movies that I had heard so much about. A custody battle was going on, my parents were warring. Having cable and the ability to rent VHS was definitely a great thing to escape into.
With my friends, we would imitate anything we’d see, the comedies, doing Spicoli impressions from ‘Fast Times’. We were so enamored with those people, those characters.”

Plot outline: Mr. Freedom is a pro-America superhero who fights for God and Country by beating, robbing, raping and killing anyone who looks like they might disagree with him. When he hears that France is in danger of falling to the Commies, Mr. Freedom heads overseas to set things right. When the welcome he receives isn’t quite as warm as he expected, he gives up hope of steering the French away from the Reds and decides to salvage what he can by destroying the entire country

American ex-pat artist William Klein’s most prolific filmmaking period came in the mid-60s, after he abandoned his original medium of photography. The films he made during this period reflect his scathing political outlook and caustic sense of humor, both of which are overwhelmingly present in “Mister Freedom”, a nonstop gutbusting satire on American imperialism, which Michael Sullivan of The Unknown Movies accurately calls “the world of Sid and Marty Kroft filtered through the eyes of Stanley Kubrick.” Sullivan goes on to say:

“Admittedly, ‘Mister Freedom’ is at times pretentious, wrongheaded, and about as subtle as a jackhammer to the forehead. But it’s also a sometimes hilarious and unpredictable satire of imperialism in the guise of a superhero movie. It sometimes plays like an issue of Captain American written by Rush Limbaugh…[m]ixing pop art with ‘Mad Magazine’-style satire, ‘Mister Freedom’ is filled with larger than life costumes and sets, purposely overheated dialogue, and cartoonishly over the top characters. Because of this, it had the potential to turn into something shrill and obnoxious. But thankfully, Klein balances out the campier aspects with searing social commentary, and the cast knows when to rein themselves in and avoid becoming pathetic Charles Nelson Reilly clones…[a]side from the Roy Lichtenstein-like set design, the most memorable aspect of ‘Mister Freedom’ is John Abbey’s crazed performance in the titular role. Abbey truly threw himself into this character, and almost seems to relish doing things like beating up French tourists (and robbing them), forcing a maid to strip at gunpoint, and spouting hilariously nonsensical pro-American speeches (’You want a piano? Here you go. Want two pianos?’)”

Mister Freedom - “Balls!” speech (MP3)
Mister Freedom - end credits theme (MP3)

I distinctly remember this as the year it all changed. Now, you can count on a couple scraps of real entertainment (Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and John C. Reilly), and nothing tooooo tasteless. Personally, I preferred the Oscars as a bloated atrocity. Now it’s just a chubby disgrace, not much to get your bile up.