Review: 'Rewinding the '80s'

When I think of the movies of the eighties, I tend to think of a really fun filmography, whether we're talking about horror, teen movies, sci-fi, or fantasy, the genre that tended to most bleed into all the others. Following a decade in which the defining cinematic style was bleakness, eighties cinema seems like a toy box of action, loud music, product tie-ins, and welcome silliness. 

Review: 'The Rolling Stones Unzipped'

There's no question that the audio side of The Rolling Stones was always their most crucial facet, but they probably would not be quite so legendary if not for their visual one. Much imagery is inextricably twined up with the band: Charlie's natty suits, Keith's pirate costumes and arsenal of flash yet functional guitars, Mick's lips and the ubiquitous logo they seemingly inspired. The Rolling Stones Unzipped is a lavish tribute to that iconography. The big hardcover showcases not only the band's garb and gear but also their handwritten lyrics, pages from Keith's 1963 diary that reveal he was always really self-congratulatory, and perhaps most charmingly, Ronnie's needlessly artful but utterly delightful handwritten/hand-designed set lists of the band's rehearsals.

However, the garb and gear shots are what really carry Unzipped. Mick's wardrobe of the sixties is truly spectacular. The grenadier jacket (by M&N Horne) and gorgeous waistcoat/ruffled silk shirt combo (by Mr. Fish) he wore in 1965 were outrageously individual choices from a time when The Beatles still wore matching uniforms. His outfits start sucking in the seventies with an overabundance of gross unitards and sub-Elvis jump suits, but they tighten up again in the late eighties and nineties with sharp frock coats. Charlie, of course, always looked fab, but his wardrobe is unfortunately underrepresented, and there's nothing at all from the closet of the always well-attired Brian Jones. However, there are some nicely crumpled pieces from Keith Richards' bedroom floor. There are also some choice pieces of equipment, such as the tabla set Charlie banged on Their Satanic Majesties Request and the bizarre toy drum set that packs such a wallop on "Street Fighting Man".

Unzipped is also notable for complimenting the pics with all-new commentaries from Jagger, Richards, Wood, and the recently departed Watts. The most substantial chunk of text is Anthony DeCurtis's nutshell history of the band, which does include a few head scratchers. He claims the Stones found psychedelia "silly" and "confusing," completely ignoring the head-long plunge they took into it with Satanic Majesties, their own prodigious LSD consumption, and the spaced out interviews Mick and Brian gave to the underground press during the acid era. He mostly ignores the band's pre-Beggars Banquet work, but calls the embarrassingly dated and antiseptic Dirty Work "possibly the most underrated album of the Stones' career" that "finds the band at its rawest and most rhythmically charged." Take another listen to "Back to Zero" and get back to me, Tony.

There are also essays from various guest stars, such as Martin Scorsese who assesses the Stones on film, Anna Sui and John Varvatos on their fashion sense, lips-logo designer John Pasche (who drops the A-bomb that he was only paid 50 quid to design that logo that has been pasted on a multi-million dollars worth of merch) on their graphic design, and Buddy Guy (who offers an ever-so-slightly and utterly justifiably begrudging nod to the Stones for introducing white America to blues artists mainstream DJs were too racist to play) on their relationship with the blues. All in all, Unzipped is a very plush, surprisingly eye-opening package, not unlike the Stones' musical body of work.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 105

The Date: January 13

The Movie: After Hours (1985)

What Is It?: A rare Martin Scorsese comedy casts Griffin Dunne as an uptight Alice lost in a SoHo Wonderland of thieves, drug overdoses, punks, leather bars, and everything else fun about mid-eighties NYC that would scare the Dockers off the average schmuck. A Teri Garr cameo includes a winking acknowledgement of her appearance in Head.

Why Today?: 10013 is a SoHo zip code, and today is 1/13.

Review: 'The Honeymoon Killers' Blu-ray

In 1967, Bonnie and Clyde changed the face of American cinema by presenting a pair of criminals as sympathetic heroes and not sparing the graphic bloodshed in the romantic antiheroes’ lurid death scene. Two years later, writer Leonard Kastle visited similar themes in his also based-on-a-true-story Honeymoon Killers, but something was drastically different at work here. Instead of a pair of cute law-breakers who remain lovable even after they start killing people during their heists, Ray (Tony Lo Bianco) and Martha (Shirley Stoler) are pretty despicable from the start. He’s a sloppy con man who marries women to bilk them. She’s a lonely heart he attempts to take for a ride but ends up partnering with when he realizes she’s just as much of a sociopath as he is. Ray’s dishonesty and Martha’s jealousy is a volatile combo, and their cons turn violent. However, the big question—and one that never needs to be asked about Bonnie and Clyde—is: do they really love each other? Well, Martha is clearly smitten with smarmy yet sexy Ray, but what is he getting from her? She tends to botch his cons. He does not respect her enough to honor his promise not to have sex with his marks. Their relationship remains ambiguous until the end when Martha makes good on a self-spiting promise she makes earlier in the picture.

As loathsome as the couple is (before she has committed a single crime, Martha makes a hideous anti-Semitic slur to let the audience know exactly where she stands as a human), they are still sympathetic. This is key, since the film would be unwatchable if this were not the case. Ray and Martha are terrible for each other, but we do want them to find happiness in their suburban home (they don’t) and we want Ray to quit messing around (he doesn’t). The women the couple target elicit similarly ambiguous feelings. They are played as fools for their religiousness or patriotism, yet their fates are unfailingly sad. In this way, The Honeymoon Killers pulls off a much greater feat than Bonnie and Clyde: instead of making us sympathize with a couple of charming pretty faces, it makes us care about a cast of people who do not have any admirable qualities simply because they’re people. In its warped way, The Honeymoon Killers is a deeply humanistic film.

It’s also a lot of fun (again in its own warped way). Even as each caper turns grim and tragic—increasingly so as the film progresses—almost every character enters the frame as a high-camp archetype that could have stepped out of a John Waters movie. There’s a lot of humor in The Honeymoon Killers, particularly in Marilyn Chris’s portrayal of a Southern belle who meets an ugly fate. The riveting performances from Lo Bianco and Stoler elevate the film way above its lowly budget, as does Oliver Wood’s cinematography.

Criterion’s new blu-ray of The Honeymoon Killers showcases that cinematography beautifully, though inconsistencies in the original film are still apparent. At their best, the elements are either strikingly high-contrast, deep-focus examples of B&W photography or dreamily over-lit and soft. Some elements are rougher, overly grainy, a bit blurry, and Criterion’s restoration does not erase those issues or deepen a soundtrack that was always kind of lo-fi and tinny (especially when Mahler’s music plays, though the fact that these dramatic pieces sound as though they’re crackling from a cheap phonograph actually compliments the camp atmosphere nicely). However, these issues are minor and the film looks fabulous overall.

Most of the extras have been ported over from Criterion’s 2003 DVD—an interview with late director Leonard Kastle, who suggests that he intended to make the anti-Bonnie & Clyde; Scott Christianson fascinating illustrated essay on the real Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck that fills in their disturbing back stories absent from the feature film—but there’s also a new half-hour featurette featuring interviews with Lo Bianco, Chris, and editor Stanley Warnow. It’s a fascinating piece in which Chris discusses how she lost the role of Martha and helped Lo Bianco and Stoler get involved in the project. Lo Bianco and Warnow explain how Martine Scorsese began directing the film only to get fired for using too much film on such a low-budget project and was ultimately replaced by writer Kastle who’d never made a film before and never made another one again. As such, The Honeymoon Killers stands as one of the great one-offs in the tradition of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter.

Review: 'Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses—Roger Corman: King of the B Movie'

Cult, horror, and schlock freaks will always think of Roger Corman primarily as the producer of some of their favorite cheap-o’s, whether they be Little Shop of Horrors, Attack of the Crab Monsters, or Grand Theft Auto. Serious cinephiles feel no guilt in praising the artistry of the best Poe pictures he directed, particularly House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death, or his even less celebrated venture into message films, the remarkable anti-segregation The Intruder. They also appreciate how he distributed works by European artists such as Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, and Ingmar Bergman (who loved the dubbed version of Cries and Whispers Corman put in drive-ins!) in the U.S. Many of our most respected filmmakers—Scorsese, Coppola, Bogdanovich, Demme, Nicholson— revere Corman as the guy who gave them their real starts in Hollywood. Feminists who know more about him than his insistence on stuffing gratuitous nudity into his movies appreciate the opportunities he afforded women directors, producers, writers, and crew people in an industry infamous for its sexism. Indie filmmakers of every stripe should bow down to Roger Corman for his pioneering the frugal business practices that made thousands of low-budget pictures possible.