Tag Archives: Salvador Dali

Ants in Your Pants and Worse!

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There have been killer ant movies before – Them! (1954), The Naked Jungle (1954), and Empire of the Ants (1977) come to mind – but Phase IV, released in 1974, may be the first and only killer ant art film. With its abstract, almost experimental approach to narrative and character development, it’s a much closer cousin to something like…say, Last Year at Marienbad (1961) than Them! While it was marketed as a science fiction film and clearly belongs in that genre, the film was both puzzling and disappointing to a certain sector of that audience that expected a killer ant movie to deliver thrills, chills and a satisfying ending.  Yet, once you accept the fact that Phase IV is not a conventional sci-fi film and will not conform to the genre conventions that you expect, you may find it absolutely chilling and brilliant. 

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Class Clowns

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College life and the behavior of students and facility alike has been a source of inspiration for countless satires and parodies on the subject from the silent era (Harold Lloyd in The Freshman [1925], Buster Keaton in College [1927]) and early sound period (Laurel & Hardy in A Chump at Oxford [1939]) on up to more contemporary examples such as National Lampoon’s Animal House [1978], Van Wilder [2002] and Accepted [2006]. Certainly one of the funniest and most memorable of all is Horse Feathers (1932), a madcap burlesque of university life starring The Marx Brothers in which the institution of higher education is held up for ridicule and satirized mercilessly.  

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No Exit

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The dinner guests in Luis Bunuel’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962) are in for an unpleasant surprise in this strange mixture of surrealism and black comedy.

Almost everyone has attended a dinner party at some point in their lives that was mandatory as well as a memorably bad experience. Maybe it was a communal meal with the boss and co-workers or a formal affair with an annoying in-law or relative. Just be glad you were able to leave the event when it became convenient. The assembled guests in Luis Bunuel’s surreal satire, The Exterminating Angel (1962), don’t have that option but the reasons for their entrapment are never clear.

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From Graphic Novel to Animated Feature: The Making of Luis Bunuel’s Las Hurdes

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Gkids is a New York based film distributor that represents Japan’s famous Studio Ghibli with such family-friendly animation features as My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) as well as more adult oriented titles like the harrowing WW2 survival tale Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and the Oscar-nominated Chico & Rita (2010), a passionate love story set in pre-revolution Cuba. Salvador Simo’s Bunuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles, one of Gkid’s recent acquisitions, belongs in the latter category and is currently playing selected theaters in the U.S. with an iTunes streaming release in the near future.  Continue reading →

Norman Lloyd: Hollywood’s Long Distance Runner, Part 1

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Norman Lloyd hangs on for dear life in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942).

On November 8, 2017 Norman Lloyd will be 203 and he shows no signs of slowing down. In recent years, he has become the go-to historian for the American film industry’s golden era due to his friendship and working relationships with such cinema legends as Charlie Chaplin, Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, John Garfield, Bernard Herrmann, John Houseman, Joseph Losey and others. Lloyd also continues to take acting roles (he has a nice cameo in the 2015 Judd Apatow comedy Trainwreck starring Amy Schumer) and appear as an interviewee in documentaries such as Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity (2015) and Broadway: Beyond the Golden Age, which is currently in post-production.

*This is a revised and updated version of the original interview which was recorded in March 2010 just prior to Lloyd’s appearance at the first Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival.   Continue reading →