UNTHANK CINEMA

DECEMBER 2011

There’s something about creative media with roots in the holiday season that really distinguishes itself from everything else. Like, is it just a coincidence that my favorite disco song of all time — “SOUL DRACULA” — is also a halloween anthem?? Or that the three worst films of all time, “The Magic Christmas Tree”, “Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny”, and the Hallmark channel exclusive “The Christmas Shoes”, are all tied up in the season of giving and small electrical devices??

Maybe it’s for this reason (as well as the likely possibility that December will be our last month of weekly screenings, for now) that we are going to steer clear of the holidays entirely this time round and guide our audience’s attention to some of the other miraculous and holy birthings we know of, dipping into grey matter and the psychedelic strange. No white xmas this year— we’ve got pink flames, blue cubes, oscillating lights and TRINA PARKS. FOUR films between now and New Years, all at BLACK DOG VIDEO (3451 Cambie), all starting sometime after 10.30pm. Bring your army buddies!!! Bring your ugly twin!

~~~DECEMBER 7th~~~
“DARKTOWN STUTTERS”
(William Witney, 1975, USA)
After nearly a half century of directing low-budget serials (most of them Westerns), and with 140 productions to his name, William Witney decided to end a long and distinguished career by making two feature length films — the totally predictable “Showdown at Eagle Gap” (boring), and the completely insane “DARKTOWN STRUTTERS”, a film which came near the end of the rich-white-grandfathers-directing-movies-about-young-urban-blacks cycle (also referred to as “blaxploitation”), and sort of laid down a checkmate on that genre’s continuance. How this movie got made I don’t know, and I don’t really want to know. It was written by the screenwriter of “Miami Blues” and has set design by Jack Fisk (who went on to do “Phantom of the Paradise”???). It’s kind of like a 1970s version of “Pootie Tang” — a cartoonish funk gusher full of outlandish stereotypes and surreal gags. You ain’t likely to laugh, but you might find yourself with a dry mouth and a jimmy leg. Features the song “What You See Is What You Get”, though it is unlikely you will understand what you are seeing or what you got.

~~~DECEMBER 14th~~~
“DEATH LAID AN EGG”
(Guilio Questi, 1968, Italy)
CAPSULE BY JESSICA» “This is one flick full of chicks. I’m not just referring to foxy ladies but also to actual chickens. Not just one or two chickens though, a whole feathery factory full of flightless fowl… yes and I do mean factory, not farm; because you see there’s something different about these chickens… they’ve been genetically modified. How, you ask? Well that’s for you to find out! This psychedelic, surreal giallo stars the always wonderful Jean-Louis Trintignant (who you may remember from last month’s bleak spaghetti western The Great Silence in the role of Silence!) as a wealthy poultry tycoon caught in a web of violence, seduction and chickens. So grab a bucket of popcorn chicken and ‘See them tear each other apart. Then see what they do with the pieces.’ “

~~~DECEMBER 21th~~~
“YAADON KI BAARAAT”
(Nasir Hussain, 1973, India)
I don’t know if this is the best Bollywood movie ever, but I will tell you this — R.D. Burman was the Indian Morricone, and this was his “Good, The Bad, and the Ugly”. The soundtrack to “Yaadon Ki Baaraat” is unparalleled, not just because it might be the best soundtrack ever, but because I have never even heard music from the same GENRE that wasn’t contained within this film — that includes thousands of Bollywood soundtracks, freakbeat methane mod music from the UK, or the Sun City Girl’s private island of prehistoric jazz (which I think is located near Tiera Del Fuego). The film is about three brothers who reunite after who cares watch the clip below and if you don’t feel like you just discovered a new primary colour then just go back to bumming around the Haight street Wells Fargo.

~~~DECEMBER 28th~~~
“CRIME WAVE”
(John Paizs, 1985, Canada)
This movie was chosen by TOM SPACEKNIGHT who says it’s about “a reclusive Winnipeg filmmaker [who] struggles with writing his first film noir, but wherever his script goes, unsavory characters seem to follow.” Some kind of gonzo kids crime caper I guess, or maybe just a burial mound of full’o’chuckles. Either way, it’s directed by the creator of MANIAC MANSION which is a show I would watch as a child and hate. But this clip looks very promising thanks tom.

FREE ADMISSION

next month will be the sequel to THANKLESS CINEMA from 2010 — our worst film competition. DO stay abreast of happenings!!

NOVEMBER 2011

Forever in a month of Wednesdays!!!!!!!!

Yes in this very strange calendar month UNTHANK CINEMA presents a total of SIX films across FIVE different Wednesdays in November. What’s more— you payday millionaire types can endorse your welfare cheques DIRECTLY TO US. We will get you LOADED on pure MOVIE MAGIC.

What does five Wednesdays mean? It means that if this were 1990 you would have received five episodes of COP ROCK in a single month, but this is the FUTURE and we are a non-rocking, LAWLESS society, so you can either come to our late night video show or you can die from (a lack of) exposure. Screenings include trailers and the whole thing begins around 10.30pm! At BLACK DOG VIDEO (3451 Cambie St.).

~~NOVEMBER 2nd~~~
“THE GREAT SILENCE”
(Sergio Corbucci, 1968, Italy) 
Bleaker than trying to paint in a Cormac McCarthy coloring book with a piece of bone, this is Sergio Corbucci’s masterpiece!! Also maybe the best non-Leone spaghetti western ever produced!! KLAUS KINSKI plays the role of “evil incarnate”; French foster-child Jean-Louis Trintignant (who you might recall from the best movie of all time, IL SORPASSO) plays an embittered mute. It is a snowy, frostbitten western about revenge and blind HATE featuring one of Morricone’s best scores ever. I thought about showing a more obscure western, but if you haven’t seen this before it should probably be considered mandatory viewing.

~~~NOVEMBER 9th~~~
“VELVET HUSTLER”
(Toshio Masuda, 1967, Japan)  
CAPSULE BY JARRETT» “Another half-baked noir from Japan’s premiere half-baked studio, Nikkatsu? Hardly. Velvert Hustler dropped a few years before Nikkatsu abandoned all this Sun-Tribe-and-Seijun-Suzuk i horseshit and just made Roman Pornos (’pink’ films, like the Red Shoe Diaries only I don’t think David Duchovny was in any of them), but what a way to go out. I first saw this film a few years back at the Cinematheque’s Nikkatsu retrospective and was shocked to find it excluded from Eclipse’s recent boxset of the best of the era (left out in the name of brand recognition for the aforementioned Suzuki’s plodding-yet-wonderfully titled Take Aim At The Police Van perhaps) as, to my mind, it stands as the height of what the genre can do and will do within its rigid budget and plot constraints. Nikkatsu hearththrob Tetsuya Wtatari stars as Goro, who manages to verbally tussle with detectives, lure men into hostess clubs, steal sports cars, kill informants, pal around with prostitutes and engage in what just might be the greatest dance sequence in film history, all the while evading chipmunk-cheeked standard Joe Shishido (Nikkatsu’s top star after his bizarre but inarguably memorable surgery) and stumbling through some sort of technicolor fever dream peaking out from behind the turgid colours of a book of carpet samples. Unusually for a noir film, the action not only unfolds at the pace of some straight-to-DVD Gus Van Sant project but contains a contagious azz-club spy vibe that drenches everything in a brightness unusual for the genre. Even in this VHS rip (god damn it Criterion let’s get a move on i don’t need a 4th version of Rules of the Game), the power of the film comes through as a testament to just how low-brow can become high-brow without even really trying..” 

~~~NOVEMBER 16th~~~
“ALOHA BOBBY AND ROSE”
(Floyd Mutrux, 1975, USA)  
Drag nights in LA stripped… hazy romantic love-on-the-run kind of nostalgie eternelle. This is one of the first movies I can think of where pop music dominated the soundtrack and made the film, rather than vice versa. I wanted to show it because I recently saw “Drive” and felt like the people deserve better…. they need to understand what DRIVING really means to “the other 99%” trully trully…. to teenage lovers, doe-eyed pollyannas, Jeff Lynne, castrated fatsos, totem poles, and cool dudes like you and me. See also: next week. “Aloha”…. it means hello AND goodbye!

~~~NOVEMBER 23rd~~~
TWO FILMS ABOUT RIDING THE BUS BY MASTERS OF WORLD CINEMA
includes
“MEXICAN BUS RIDE”
(Luis Bunuel, 1952, Mexico) 
and
“MR. THANK YOU”
(Hiroshi Shimizu, 1936, Japan) 
Back when the movie BUS 174 was released and I was working at Rogers Video in pants glued together out of mirrorball shavings, one of my most popular chestnuts was “WELL DON’T RENT IT UNLESS YOU’VE SEEN THE OTHER 173!! YOU’LL NEVER UNDERSTAND HOW COACHMAN JORGE GOT HIS UNDERGOD TALISMAN!” It was so funny in 2003 but that was then and this is now, and now that I give it more thought, maybe I wasn’t so far off the mark in the first place. Cinema has forever had a wild fetish for public transit, from the GRADUATE to SPEED to Lavar Burton’s controversial docudrama ROUTES (ahhhhh what), which is why I am making this our first foray in double bills…. it’s two relatively short films about riding the bus (without your sister) by very famous directors of world cinema and if you do the math this is probably BUS 17 and BUS 49. MEXICAN BUS RIDE is about the misadventures of a couple newly-weds, filmed when Bunuel was in Mexico in ¡top form! Lillia Prado is so hot she will make you wish you were gay (if straight), straight (if gay), male (if female), dead (if alive) ; meanwhile MR. THANK YOU is a delightful jaunt through the rural Japan, endearing and full of gorgeous scenery with a polite score. These are the sorts of movies you just soakkkkk uppppp…. no melodrama, just picaresque fun! Get on the bus!!

~~~NOVEMBER 30th~~~
“ROLLER BOOGIE”
(Mark L. Lester, 1979, USA) 
CAPSULE BY JESSICA» “If you thought the most memorable thing Linda Blair ever did was masturbate with a crucifix you were sorely mistaken. This film contains basically everything that the designers at American Apparel have been using for inspiration for the past 5 years. You’ve never seen so many short shorts under silk shirts over tube tops over leotards under suspenders attached to stirrup leggings of every colour in the rainbow. Featuring a song about roller skating by Cher. What more could you want?”

ADMISSION IS STILL FREE!!!!

also- this month is female film fan month!! ladies get free manicures. Men get advice on how to talk to women.

OCTOBER 2011

Only two films this month because I’m going to Disneyland one week and then probably Disneyworld the next…………. let me know if you want me to bring back some copperwire, eyeteeth, swizzle sticks or anything, because when a man goes roaming he never returns without a few trophies. And in he meantime here’s something to bring in the tides- two perfect films from the Marijuana and Insect Corridor. Screenings are at BLACK DOG VIDEO (3451 Cambie St.) and doors are at 10.30pm / movie starts at 11pm promptly!

~~~OCTOBER 5th~~~
“THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT”
(Michael Cimino, 1974, USA)
You might know Michael Cimino as “the man who killed the seventies”, but to be more precise I think he is really the man who MURDERED THE SEVENTIES. I am of course referring to his horse-guts and all 1980 feature “Heaven’s Gate”… a film which was so bomb(t)astic and vain that it killed the auteur spirit and arts funding forever and its why movies like “Garden State” have theme park rides, why Terrence Malick was stuck in a well for twenty years, and why I can only grow facial hair on my shoulders. Now…… while I think all that shit might have been worth it (I love “Heaven’s Gate” unapologetically and the Garden State ride is 4Gs of awesome), here is a film that undoes it all - his first feature, and one of the best of its breed forever. It’s a buddy road crime caper starring JEFF BRIDGES and CLINT EASTWOOD which veers a bit from our regular mandate of only showing cult-less, under-appreciated movies (in that no one could possibly watch this film and not appreciate it) but whatever— this movie is like “Bottle Rocket” meets “Badlands”… flawless and FUN. Amazing soundtrack and cinematography, both accessible and totally face down in the paisley. Don’t miss!

~~~OCTOBER 26th~~~
“NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES”
(Rene Cardona, 1969, Mexico)
KILL KILL KILL for halloween I have unilaterally decided that we will be screening this grisly Mexican horror gem featuring actual heart transplant surgery, Mexican girlie wrestling, and the lust of a man in the body of a beast!! Really the only thing this film doesn’t have is Santo (or Blue Demon) but hell we can dress up in wrestling masks and shadowbox our way through this unflinching testimony of terror nonetheless. Plot of the film is pretty simple- transplant gone wrong, followed by a lot of nightstalking, wrestling sequences, detective drama, rom-rom, and some really top shelf jaguar-button sound effects (see the trailer). It’s B grade cinema if the B stood for BARREL CHESTED. They found Montezuma’s gold and it’s half man, half beast, ALL HORROR. It’s halloween so what do would you rather watch… Carnosaur??

ADMISSION IS FREE!!!

oh yeah, and we got the SALT DRINK

SEPTEMBER 2011

If you enjoy to watch a couple cinemas here and there… on screen, in a room… then you will rejoice to hear that UNTHANK CINEMA now has a regular weekly screening event scheduled at corporate super-affiliate BLACK DOG VIDEO (3451 Cambie St.). We are showing unpopular movies every Wednesday at 10.30PM which is bad news for both the regular 9-2-5ers and the rancheros who gotta wake up at the first spark of the weekday sun, but good news for gravediggers, pot-ash nightwatchers, and unemployed video industry workers who aint wanting to stray too far from the return bin.

Here is the September program»»

~~~SEPTEMBER 7th~~~
“PINBALL SUMMER aka PICK-UP SUMMER”
(George Mihalka, 1980, Canada)
 Canadian teen sex bungle that tried to cash in on the pinball craze of the late seventies (remember when Elton John had flippers grafted onto his dreamcoat??) Except that in the few weeks it took between the screenplay being written and the film being produced, that craze was all but embalmed, and the film was rebranded as “Pick-up Summer” IMAGINE THAT. It’s a feel great summer slip-n-slide, kind of like “Van Nuys Blvd” for anyone who saw that a few years back, but spoken in an undeniably Canadian brogue. Good epitaph to the good times they’re gone.

 ~~~SEPTEMBER 14th~~~
“ROAD TO SALINA”
(Georges Lautner, 1970, France) 
Monolithic sunbleached noir about a drifter who is adopted into a strange desert-dwelling family as a surrogate for their long lost son. Wild prog soundtrack and epic sandscapes beautify a real troubled fable about stolen identities and sex crazy tomboy Mimsy Farmer who will make you forget gender, forget art, forget time and temperature………… this film is a goddamn prometheus!!!!!…… Kind of the perfect synthesis of all genres, beloved by all .

~~~SEPTEMBER 21st~~~
“PARIS BLUES”
(Martin Ritt, 1961, USA)
This is a film that leaves me with TEARS IN MY EYES- it’s been fifty years since it was released, and I still ain’t never seen a film that deals as honestly with the TOUGH CHOICES the way this one does. Ex-pats Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier are living la vie boheme in gay Pareee…. romancing tourists and playing wine cellar jazz (which climaxes in a trombone trumping trumpet showdown between Newman and LOUIS ARMSTRONG). It’s a good bit of fun, but this film is a real ace in so many ways….. its a movie about how what you want is who you are, and that’s ok, even if what you want is awful. What’s a bigger taboo than that??? You think Ron Howard would direct that? You think fartin Scorcese would direct that??

~~~SEPTEMBER 28th~~~
“THE WOMAN HUNT”
(Eddie Romero, 1973, USA/Philippines)
Jack Hill (“Coffy”) wrote this one, and I really think he knew the score. I mean, he was writing directly for the id right……… with a bit of tongue, cheek and breasts for colour. That’s how you pack a drive in / sell folding chairs / hang a bunch of dongs at CanTire. WOMAN HUNT is a “Most Dangerous Game” adaptation, a premise which basically always succeeds (see: Ice-T in “Surviving the Game” or Stone Cold Steve Austin in “The Condemned”). The tagline is “women are made for men……… TO HUNT. Set your sights on the tastiest game of all”. Woman studies brown-bagger! Male studies primary text! 

ADMISSION IS FREE!!

plus we got sweets n sodas

We have been screening movies since…… 2008 I think? Monthly for a while and then it kind of petered out when it got harder to find a stable venue (I’m still trying to get back that beam of shimmering moonlight we used to project “The Naked Island” with). Anyways, maybe worthwhile to keep an archive of the films we’ve shown up to date

*********

The Beast Must Die —- The Doberman Gang —- Games of Survival —- Hold On! —- The Hunting Party —- Kilink Strip and Kill —- Legend of Boggy Creek —- Lemonade Joe —- Macunaima —- Magic Christmas Tree —- Naked Island —- Poor Pretty Eddie —- Raw Force —- Robo Vampire —- School in the Crosshairs —- Il Sorpasso —-Switching: Goodbye Me —- Things —- Van Nuys Blvd.

TRUE LOSERS

If there were a lesson entombed somewhere in Josh “Racy Pacey” Jackson’s 2008 cancon cancer flick One Week, it must have been that in Canada it never hurts to set the bar low. Like… earthworm/
dugout in an underground baseball field
LOW

If you missed One Week’s brief theatrical splay- went to see it at the Capitol 6, only to find out that the Capitol 6 is now an American Apparel- then let me tell you- its more or less a ninety minute Edwin music video that plays how the movie Wild Hogs might look if you spliced it with some cutting-room floor karaoke-style montages of spirit bears and Husky stations. It’s a Tim Horton’s training tape for Canadians who spike their coffee with salt, a kind of super weirdo flaccid man-meets-machine-meets-Manitoba flick, as Pacey guns it from Toronto to Tofino, spending his last week alive- EVER- burning through a whole life’s CADs on tacky shit and lodge-accommodations across the praries. The film’s tagline is “what would you do?”, implying that on the edge of death your are free to do anything, but it seems like Telefilm (who federally funded this national shame) couldn’t budget a fact checker, because they eem to think there are actually humans out there, alive, who would choose to spend their last week on the precipice of infinite nothing ponying around on the set of Corner Gas.

Anyways, what I mistook for a major plot hole turns out in fact to be NATIONALISM. You see- Canadian film has actually fetishized underachievement since just about its inception– look at Goin’ Down the Road (1970), the most Clearly Canadian film of all time- two shaggy Nova Scotians head to the big city looking to score, only to get waylaid by an Erik Satie record and a fistful of potato snacks. Yes this means that Canada is really our home and native land of diminished expectations!!

so this is the honest to god true form of “Canadiana” – the overlooked LOSER movies the sixties and seventies… films in the mold of Goin’ Down the Road which set out to show Canadians they COULD NOT HAVE IT IF THEY REALLY WANT (these cornfaced nobuddies are permanent underdogs!!)

LOSER MOVIES were films about high hopes and weak payoff, featuring characters who would repeatedly drink from the well of prosperity even though they knew some cocksure American had just made a splash in it.

Hitting theatres around the same time Susan Atwood and Northrop Frye were lambasting Canadians for being a bunch of hapless scavengers roughing it in the bush (see: Survival or the Bush Garden), loser movies reminded scattered audiences that the American Dream of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was just a hoarse whisper from the south. The Canadian Dream was about making do… with NOTHING MUCH TO DO

Here are three of the best films I know of which put Pacey’s moto-Canuck demo reel to shame:

The Rowdyman (1972) – Sex-starved manchild Gordon Pinsent refuses to age, like a peepshow Peter Pan. Spurned by maturity and the love of a good woman, Pinsent’s “Will Cole” slumber parties with teenage girls, only to crack a joke so funny that his best friend ends up falling into a printing press. Filmed in colour, but you can barely tell because it’s set in Nova Scotia.

Paperback Hero (1973) – Rick Dylan (the most misogynistic character name ever) is a big fish in a dried-up-puddle – a hockey half-star with interchangeable gal-pals who can’t tell Shitsville, Saskatchewan from the Wild West fantasy he lusts after. Gunslinging and Gordon Lightfoot get the best of him in the end, but the film does contain a weird shower sex scene that is so simultaneously erotic and boring that it defies belief.

The Hard Part Begins (1973) – A country-and-western crooner past his prime, Jim King warbles mediocre songs for sparse crowds and candid execs. Circling Ontario like a dying seabird he cheats on his loyal girlfriend with fast-food floozies and ends up shirking it all when she gets the golden ticket and he gets a crook from the wings. Should be essential viewing for all Canadian touring bands since, like Paul Lynch’s follow-up film Blood and Guts (about the Canadian pro-wrestling circuit), the motto seems to be “Jesus Christ just give up already and become a civil servant or something”. AMBITION GETS YOU NOWHERE.

Honorable mention: Nobody Waved Goodbye (1964); Sweet Substitute (1964); Wedding in White (1972); and of course Degrassi: School’s Out (1993- the bleakest post-secondary yarn in Canadian history).