Montreal Film Festival
(part 1 of 2)
Film reviews and commentary by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1994 Mark R. Leeper
I had never been to a film festival before and I was curious what made them click. Is it just a lot of films being shown various places? Are there any central activities? How does it work?
Well, first some large numbers. People who attend the full festival get their choice of 250 films to see. There are roughly 300,000 attendees. Four movie theaters participate but because two are large multiplexes there are as many as eleven different films showing at the same time and perhaps a twelfth if you include the free screenings of films in the park. Filmmakers from all over the world provide films and on one screen you may have a real mixed bag of films showing in one day. A typical theater will show in one day: DINNER'S ON THE TABLE (Canadian) LES AMOUREUX (French) BANDIT QUEEN (Indian) FAUT PAS RIRE DU BONHEUR (French) I LOVE YOU ROSA (Turkish) NOT ANGELS BUT ANGELS (Czech) SHE LIVES TO RIDE (US made-for-TV)
Uh, monolinguals like myself have to be a little careful. I wanted to see a film about Joan of Arc and then Evelyn noticed it was just in French. Of course they seem geared to boorish US visitors: their description of the film explained who Joan of Arc was. (It turns out education seems to be failing Canadians just like it is failing US people. If anything, you see more people listing prices like .99 cents here than you see in the US.
There are two handbooks of the festival. There is a free handout with schedules at the various theaters and an index so that you can find when a given film is playing. It also has a page or two of descriptions of the film, but not nearly enough. For C$16 you get a catalog of films 3/4-inch thick and heavier than you might want to carry around. It has a page on each of the feature films. The printed materials are poorly designed. If you look through the catalog and a film looks interesting, but you are not sure it will be in English you have to go to the handout and look up in the index to see when the film is playing. But that is only a time and date. You then have eleven different listings to search to find which theater is showing the film you want. (Evelyn points out that there the index does tell you in an encoded form which theater has the film, but I am just slowly catching on.) Then you look at that listing to find the language. Some are English, some are French with English subtitles. You might have picked a film that is in Dutch with French subtitles. It is not quite that bad because you can look at the title of the film and usually can guess what language the film will be in and usually the non-English films will have English subtitles. But the listings could be a lot more convenient to use.
Oh, and you are currently reading not just the best description of the rules of how the fest works--well, that goes without saying--you are reading the only one. We have not found in French or in English any explanation of how things work at the festival. We missed the first night's film because we did not know about exchanging tickets in advance, but that is getting a bit ahead of myself.
Tickets for the showings (other than three or four free films shown out of doors--mostly concert films like the director's cut of WOODSTOCK) are inexpensive compared to evening tickets at home. They are C$6.50 individually or C$45 for a book of ten. (In US currency $5.08 and $35.16 respectively.) You basically have to pick up tickets in advance or risk the film selling out. Evelyn assumed that only if you pay the C$6.50 you can reserve a place at the film. That made all the difference. She thought that if they "sold out" all their seats with individual tickets, nobody could get in using tickets from the ticket books. By this misunderstanding that is what happened Thursday night, the first night of the festival. They had two featured films, KABLOONAK and NATURAL BORN KILLERS. We did not know we could get advanced tickets with the book so both were sold out. Instead we went to another film, one not showing as part of the festival, but playing at a non-participating theater to the same audience. It is:
ARCHITECTURE OF DOOM
This is a 1992 Swedish documentary (in German--perhaps for German television?) by Peter Cohen examining Hitler's philosophy and National Socialism as an aesthetic movement and an attempt to impose by force a single aesthetic sensibility on the world. It was a fanatical effort by any Procrustian means necessary to make the world fit his personal idea of what is beauty. Hitler's aesthetic was, it is suggested, built on three pillars: the town where he was born, Wagner, and Classical art.
Cohen sees the entire political career of Hitler from this point of view. Hitler was a failed painter and architect who saw the collapse of the world coming led by degenerate art and tolerance of what he personally considered ugly. His inspiration was Rienzi, a knight in a Wagnerian opera who wanted to return to the grandeur of Mediterranean Classical cultures but was betrayed. According to Hitler the Classical age was entirely beautiful, but that the protection and preservation of so-called "genetic defectives" like the mentally and physically handicapped as well as Jews was a threat to what he saw as an ever-diminishing proportion of the population who were people of pure and untainted blood. He considered himself "a political Robert Koch" ferreting out the impure genetic microbes in society and restoring society to health. He brought 45% of German physicians into the Nazi party and then had them institute programs of what he called "euthanasia" to murder those who had impure blood.
Cohen's Hitler did not want art that pointed to social ills in his new world. The only acceptable art would portray man as noble and living in harmony with an idealized nature. He himself designed the uniforms, insignia, and standards of his followers. Part of his plan was to make over Berlin as a fantastic futuristic city based on Classical artistic principles decorated with huge statues, thirty feet tall or higher. Part of the design was that even the ruins should outdo Roman and Greek ruins in magnificence. Cohen shows us all this with remarkable new documentary footage and places more familiar footage in a new context.
At first it seems a trivialization of Nazism to consider it an aesthetic movement--an attempt to beautify the world. It also at first glance seems to be literally adding insult to injury for Hitler's victims. This certainly is not the point of view of the of ARCHITECTURE OF DOOM and Cohen's interpretation only serves to make Hitler seem more perverted. He fashions himself a heroic exterminator of pests without giving any thought to the equalizing of humans to lice, rats, and insects in his attempts to get to his idealized vision of a squeaky clean world. This film serves as an admonition to those who would regulate art forms like rock and rap the extremes to which it is possible to go and how destructive the results can be when carried to fascist extremes. I am not accusing those who would limit and censor lyrics of going to the extremes of a Hitler, but there may be similarities in the impulses and the film is a warning against trying too hard to re-form the world to fit some idealized view of how things should be.
This film is a major reinterpretation of history, but it is not clear that any really useful conclusions can be drawn from it. Does it make a difference whether people are murdered from a motive of hatred or aesthetics? In fact, might it not even be the same thing? While the value of ARCHITECTURE OF DOOM's conclusions might be questioned, it is a totally engrossing documentary which has a lot of very striking archival footage. I rate it a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
At this writing it is the second day of the festival. Montreal is a city that has, if anything, more panhandlers than Manhattan. They are a much narrower ethnic mix, but Rue Ste. Catherine seems to draw them. Ste. Catherine is the center of the festival. All the theaters are on Ste. Catherine or are a short distance off of it on a side street.
Waiting in line for our second film we talked to a gentleman from the Bronx who told us what was wrong with the festival. We told him what films had looked interesting and he told us what bad taste in films we had. Ah, New Yorkers! Well, he has to get in line if he wants to insult my taste. Come to think of it, he did.
On our way in we got had news and good news. The bad news was that they did not just take coupons from the book for entrance, we had to go back and pick up tickets for the specific film. The good news was that Evelyn was wrong and we could get advance tickets with our book coupons. We had erroneously bestowed upon ourselves the status of second-class citizens because we had bought tickets in bulk. Well, no problem. We probably saw a better film--although a really bad print-- as a result.
Our second film is an ironic juxtaposition with ARCHITECTURE OF DOOM.
THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT
This is a film that has gotten a lot of favorable critical comment and that is in large part because it is a nice pleasant enjoyable film that takes no chances beyond those obvious in the premise. The story is of three drag queens making a journey across the Australian desert from Sydney to Alice Springs to make a performance engagement. Knowing that, about two-thirds of the script more or less writes itself on auto-pilot. Of course they run into bigots along the way and have a violent scene with them. Of course their gaudy show clothing looks really strange on the backdrop of the desert. Of course there are conflicts among the three and some deep realizations along the way. Of course aborigines, children, and other people pure of heart accept them without a second thought and it is mostly their parents and boozy men in bars who have problems accepting them. Of course every love song will have a second interpretation when sung by this crowd. (It is not unlike the game of adding the phrase "in bed" to fortune cookie fortunes.) This film is about as daring as wearing white socks with black shoes and is certainly in no worse taste. That aside, many of the cliches it uses are cliches because they are entertaining and this film that wants so much to be shocking is nothing more than light, pleasant entertainment.
Felicia, Mitzi, and Bernadette, born respectively Adam, Anthony, and Ralph, played respectively by Guy Pearce, Hugo Weaving, and Terence Stamp, dress in gaudy women's show clothing and mouth the lyrics of popular songs. Hey, it's a living. The first two are drag queens while Bernadette is a transsexual. They have to get to Alice Springs for an engagement so Felicia buys an old tour bus and christens it "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert." Tensions are constantly present as they try to outdo each other in being catty to each other. But the first real strain on their relationship comes when Mitzi admits to having a wife in Alice Springs. Not too unpredictably the bus breaks down and getting going again is a minor adventure in itself.
Director Stephen Elliott has very little insightful to tell us about drag queens. I would like to assume that these people are somewhat deeper than this film's slightly insulting behavior. One, for example, has as her great ambition to climb to the top of King's Canyon in drag. Elliott can tell his audience that this is an innocent enough ambition but isn't he being insulting by making his character so superficial? Much has been made of the departure this film is for Terence Stamp. Until now he has played mostly straight-laced anal- retentives. Bernadette is not straight-laced but if anything she is even more anal-retentive than Stamp's usual characters.
This film is really little more daring than having Whoopi Goldberg dress as a nun. Unless you reject the well-labeled premise from the start, you will probably find this a surprisingly wholesome feel-good sort of film, a little strong on manipulation and weak on credibility in spots, but rarely failing to entertain. I found it to be about a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
After the film we queued up to get the tickets for upcoming showings. We got near the door to enter the theater when an employee of the theater came to fold the line with posts and velvet ropes. One placed a post to my left about two feet from the door and attached a rope to it going back and another hooked to the doors to its left. "That's not right," I thought. The line shouldn't have a bend here. This is where the line should end. A second employee came out, saw the same thing we did and tried to explain to the first why what he was doing would not work. The first employee went off to take down the first rope. The wiser rolled his eyes in an expression that transcended the language barrier. Eventually we got in and got tickets for everything else we wanted to see. Though it did not at first appear so, Luck of Leeper was positive for once. The weather could be nicer, I suppose. But ARCHITECTURE OF DOOM seemed to have reverberations in PRISCILLA and also in our next film.
JACK L. WARNER, THE LAST MOGUL
There are many accusation made these days about the Jewish people. It is claimed that they controlled the State Department... totally untrue. It is claimed they control banking and finance... also an invention. It is claimed they control the film industry. Well, that one really was true at one time. They didn't just control it, they WERE the film industry. Jews invented it, often risking all they had on it. The major studios were all founded by Jews before there was a film industry. But unique among the major studios was Warner Brothers. It was actually owned by a family. They made running a studio a family business.
JACK L. WARNER is a television documentary made for one of the Turner stations, written and directed by Gregory Orr, the son of a step-daughter of Warner. It covers much the same territory as the book HOLLYWOOD BE THY NAME by Cass Sperling, another grandchild of Warner. Orr's documentary style is workman-like, but the film benefits from particularly interesting subject matter. Warner's career spans the film industry from the time of Edison's Kinetiscopes up through the film 1776.
The brothers were four of the five sons of a Polish shoemaker who came to America fleeing the oppression of Cossacks. The fledgling cinema industry was the last of several businesses the boys tried, first projecting, then exhibiting, then distributing, and finally making films. They might have remained just a minor studio that would have quickly died but for their gamble on sound which made them into a major studio. The documentary covers their carving out a niche of films appealing to the common people without the high gloss of an MGM. Crime and gangster films were their mainstay.
But while Jack was trying to appeal to the common viewer, his second wife was building his house into a palace and price was no object. Orr says the studio made the first anti-Nazi feature film, CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY. At the request of FDR they also made the pro-Russian MISSION TO MOSCOW. It was a favor they would come to regret. The film covers the war period, the decline in the post-war era, Jack's cooperation with HUAC, and the power struggles at the studio with their roots in the earliest family days.
The documentary gets off to a slow start with Orr telling his childhood reminiscences of the Warner mansion and showing an amateur film he made as a boy. That is the worst touch of the film and it is over quickly enough. But Orr continues to put himself too much into the film. There is also a disorienting effect from Orr taking events in semi-chronological order, but straying once in a while. We hear CASABLANCA discussed before we are told about the studio's response to the US getting involved in the war.
Orr uses interviews of people famous and not so famous who knew Jack Warner. But the greatest insights come from Neal Gabler who seems to put Warner into a context better than Orr can. Also, of course, there is a wealth of documentary footage, old home movies, and of course clips from the films made.
Gabler's insights include observations that the United States seems to have gotten its image of itself from movies created by outsiders, recent immigrants mostly. Warner in particular made film about characters a lot like himself: short, feisty underdogs, often recently emigrated from Europe. That description fits Cagney, Robinson, Raft, and Muni. Gabler cites the conflicts between Harry Warner with his Old World ways and Jack Warner who was more a product of the Americas. This conflict is reflected in the rabbi and his son in THE JAZZ SINGER.
JACK L. WARNER, THE LAST MOGUL is nothing great, but how wrong can it go in covering so much of the history of the American film industry through one of its most pivotal figures? It gets a tremendous boost from the cinematic interest value. My rating would be a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Montreal is a very good restaurant town. There is a really good ethnic mix of restaurants. Dinners out so far have been "Smoked meat Pizzaghetti." For a Yankee like myself that name had the greatest number of mysteries to unravel. That turns out to be more segregated than the title implies. "Pizzaghetti" is just a small pizza with a side of spaghetti. For local food, a great favorite seems to be the mysteriously named "smoked meat." I am not used to ordering anything with a name so vague. (Even "hot dog" is specific if not accurate.) Smoked meat turns out to be what we would call "corned beef." At least I hope so. I think there was a horror film once called MOTEL HELL in which food was similarly just called "meat" without being more specific. The meat turned out to be what the pirates used to call "long pork" or "long John." How many readers of TREASURE ISLAND recognize the delicious irony of having a ship's cook named Long John Silver? But that is one heck of a digression. Our second night was had Arab fast food and our third night we had a nice meal of Hungarian food.
Our third day we again got to the theater early. This time we met while waiting a very kindred spirit. He is into exotic cuisine, philosophy, know mathematics, and of course he likes cinema. Herb Louis was his name (or perhaps Lewis) and he is the former head of a philosophy department at a Canadian university. He made some restaurant recommendations that we will probably use. I made a reference to Evariste Galois and he knew a fair amount about him.
MISS AMERIGUA
The town is Amerigua, perhaps in Paraguay. Maybe eighteen years ago when it was little more than a few dirt farms, Colonel Banderas murdered a discontented activist farmer in front of the eyes of the farmer's family under the pretext that the farmer was a Communist. Everisto, the farmer's young son, responded by attacking the Colonel, then fleeing the country. There have been many changes since then. Now the country, while every bit as corrupt, pays lip service to the ideals of democracy. Still, the entire village lives in the shadow of Colonel Banderas, now an important national figure. Rather than justa few farms Amerigua looks like a town. It has a town hall; it has a radio station.
This is a big day in Amerigua. There will be a big beauty pageant in the evening where the village will choose the most beautiful woman in the village. Colonel Banderas has decided in the name of democracy that just the right woman should win and will tell the judges whom they must choose, once he finally makes up his mind if it should be his daughter, his son's fiance, or his mistress. Important people will be coming to Amerigua, some on the morning train, and a Japanese diplomat will be coming to town to be one of the judges. The concert will be sponsored by several international companies who trade in this country.
But for a short prologue, the entire film takes place in one day as we get to meet the village. First we meet Innocencio, a nerdish young radio reporter never seen without huge large earphones and a huge microphone. We see the preparations for the big day, and petty political squabbles over what should be the color of the welcoming carpet. The various contestants waking up for the big day. Front- runner for the competition is Maria (who looks very much like Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) engaged to the Colonel's son and due to be married the same day as she vies for the title of Miss Amerigua. Carmen, the Colonel's daughter is willful and spoiled. Rosa, Everisto's sister who does not get along with her mother, is now the Colonel's mistress willing to do all she needs to in order to get out of Amerigua. Then there is Reencarnacion, the gay hairdresser with a penchant for Tarot and the supernatural.
There is something about a beauty pageant that reveals greed, hypocrisy, superficiality, and vanity. Something about women vying to be chosen as the most beautiful just seems a natural target for satire. Much of this film is reminiscent of Michael Ritchie's underrated SMILE. But this film mixes into the cocktail heavy doses of politics and even some fantasy. This film is written in the style of magical realism in which minor fantasy elements get mixed into the plot. Minor touches include a harp that refuses to be played and a bust that makes comments on what it sees.
Luis Vera's MISS AMERIGUA is a good satiric comedy, at times quite funny, that deserves release in the US. It needs a better job of English subtitling, but with that it could do very nicely on the art house circuit in the US. I would rate it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
The Desjardins Center is a shopping mall that also is a sort of center of the film festival's activities. An open area in the center is given over to displays of film posters of films in the festival, film art, and press conferences. The film art look as lot like the media art one sees in the art shows of science fiction conventions. We saw a conference with Michael Austin and Mark Abraham talking about their film PRINCESS CARABOO. The area was really full, but that was because the second press conference scheduled was some American comedian and actor named Steve Martin. Uh, lest you be confused I hasten to point out that is the actor's name and it has nothing to do with the character Steve Martin, who was played by Raymond Burr in the film classic GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS. Apparently this comedian picked the same name for recognition value. The story for PRINCESS CARABOO is apparently true, though some of the press questioned if things could have happened like shown in the early 19th century.
The next film is one that I do not expect to be of quite so higha quality as the ones I have seen to this point. I have a special interest in fantasy films so I am curious to see anything new in that field. The catalog said a some intriguing things about TOM THUMB, but how good can it be on that subject?
THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF TOM THUMB
The film BRAINSTORM had as one of the details of its plot that there existed a tape such that if the person merely saw the tape it could result in permanent psychosis. Until I saw THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF TOM THUMB I doubted that such a thing could exist. This is a very grim and dark fairy tale reminiscent of ERASERHEAD done with the animation of NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. The film is mostly done in model animation with some pixilated live-action and though the film is only 61 minutes, it has the feel of a nightmare that goes on a lot longer.
The story takes place in a grimy fly-ridden future. A mistake in an artificial insemination factory leaves fly organs in a bottle of sperm. The result is that a laborer and his wife give birth to child only six inches high. They name him Tom. Their joy is only short- lived as two faceless Kafka-esque government agents break into the laborers' flat and steal the child, taking him to a scientific lab where sadistic experiments are performed on him. Tom escapes down a waste drain with the help of some bizarre skeleton creature he befriends at the lab. In the outside world he finds a race of small people almost his scale. They wage constant war against the humans--or "giants" as they call them--who, oblivious to their existence, come tramping through their neighborhoods causing terrible destruction.
This film is mostly the creation of Dave Borthwick who directed, wrote, and edited the film. Together with Frank Passingham he also animated the film and did the photography with animation techniques very reminiscent of Czech films. Here he creates a bleak and grimy world of huge fascistic government agencies, troglodyte wage-slave laborer citizens, and a secret society of tiny people. His little people live in constant terror of the oblivious humans. In short, this is a very good job of creating a very good film that is darn discomforting to watch and that can be recommended to only a razor- narrow audience. THE SECRET ADVENTURES was my kind of film and I could only barely stand the images I was seeing. See this one if you dare but don't bring your mother or your kids. While I say that, I cannot imagine where this film will find a distribution even in video stores. It is too short to play as a feature film, too downbeat to show to children, and too animated to get an adult audience. This is a challenging film but not totally without its rewards. I rate it a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
To fill out the time with a somewhat lighter film from the same producers, Richard Hutchinson and his Bolexbrothers Ltd. have included the nine-minute piece, "The Biz," which uses live-action people with animated masks covering their faces. This animated film is about a cocktail party to honor Ed, whose new film was just screened to rave reviews. We see that various people who talk to Ed at the party. The masks help to show us what Ed is thinking and help to characterize the other guests. It also seems made for the BBC and would be a good film to have included in one of Expanded Entertainment's International Tournees of Animation.
That was better than I expected it to be. I suppose the fact that the films are pre-screened and have to be selected will mean that it is more likely that the films will be good. Certainly I am averaging higher ratings for films that I see here than I would for films I see at home. I have yet to see a film I have not liked. Of course I have to break that streak tonight since I will be going to a film I gave up on after fifteen minutes the last time I tried it. I will be going to the free showing of WOODSTOCK. Concert films are definitely not my thing. Certainly rock concerts film are not. But before that I will be seeing one of the most highly-recommended films showing here this year.
WHAT HAPPENED WAS...
This is a film that already has rally stripes. Tom Noonan wrote, directed and starred in this film which he made for only $300,000 and took only eleven days to shoot it. They finished editing the film just hours short of the deadline for entering it in the Sundance Film Festival. But the effort to get the film done in time was repaid. At Sundance it won the Waldo Salt screenwriting award and Grand Jury prize. Samuel Goldwyn snapped it up for an immediate profit. Noonan's face may be familiar to filmgoers for other films in which he has acted. He has played psychopathic killers in films like MANHUNTER (the earlier of the two "Hannibal Lector films") and THE LAST ACTION HERO. It is good to see him in a more normal role.
WHAT HAPPENED WAS... is basically a one-act play for two people produced as a film. But for a few scenes at the beginning, the film is all one scene taking place as it happens in front of the camera. This, however, is not to imply the film was made in a single take but it does give the film a certain immediacy. A woman has invited a co-worker to her Manhattan apartment for dinner. Both work in a legal office, Jackie as a secretary, Michael as a paralegal. She has been impressed by his sense of humor and is intrigued by his apparent working on some secret project of his own. She has invited him to a candlelight dinner at her apartment. The evening begins very awkwardly. Each has a talent for choosing just the wrong thing to say to the other. The date appears not to be working out at all. But on and off the wine seems to be loosening each other up. They begin trading confidences and dropping defenses. Eventually each will know more about the other than either of them really want.
Tom Noonan's Michael is controlled and systematic. Karen Sillas's Jackie lives with emotional tides that Michael has been able to suppress in himself. He is mechanical and she is disturbed. Noonan's script gives hints as to how each has gotten that way, but in the end much is left to conjecture. Both performances have impressive authenticity. My one complaint would be that film is not really the proper medium for this script. More appropriate would be the live stage. Noonan's direction intentionally makes little use of the advantages that cinema has over the live stage while it certainly could benefit from the additional intensity and immediacy that live performances would have given it. Making the film more cinematic would probably have further sacrificed the immediacy. Noonan at least does not repeat Hitchcock's error in ROPE of trying to create immediacy by simulating a single take. In ROPE Hitchcock apparently realized the technique became a distraction and he did not repeat his error in DIAL M FOR MURDER. Occasionally Noonan misjudges the pacing of his material, but his direction was usually on-target.
In spite of the critical acclaim this film is getting, it is not nearly as original as the rumor mill would have it. It was reminiscent of other dramatic works and very similar to a play produced on PBS in the 60s called, if memory serves, "Birdbath." While falling short of my expectations for the film, I would still give it a respectable high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. You won't see much else like it in the theaters soon.
This is where a lot of people are going to discover they do not agree with my taste, if they haven't already.
Worm's-eye-view editorial: Traditional musical instruments do not put out a sound that can be heard very great distances. This is why electrical amplification was invented. It was intended to reflect with fidelity the sound that the musical instruments were making. They did that within their designed range of amplification. Go outside that range and the sound would be distorted. Often what you would get would be a loud howl much like the howls of a person in pain. Music is supposed to evoke an emotional response in the listener. But not every sound that evokes an emotional response is music. These howls which had a definite pitch and which did evoke emotional responses--like music did--came to be considered music. Many musicians used electronic distortion as an integral part of their music. What helped immensely with the acceptance of this sort of noise as music is that it often carried with it a political message that was popular, even if less than eloquent or more rhetorical than well-reasoned. This is not to say the message was wrong, but these were not very good arguments for their point of view. Jimi Hendrix did a version of the "Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock that was made up entirely of electronic howls. At a time when America was probably making serious ethical mistakes Hendricks was saying less-than-eloquently, "America bad!" Atrocious noise from someone who agrees with your politics does not constitute music.
Following WHAT HAPPENED WAS... we went to see what remained of the director's cut of WOODSTOCK. This was an outdoor showing and the area was packed. We sat on a hill to the side and watched. We heard basically something with a beat and a lot of audio distortion. Joan Baez then sang about Joe Hill. I am not all that fond of her music, but it does have melody. However I did tell Evelyn that she should decide if we stay or walk out, and the next performer was another distortion artist whose beat we could feel on our backs as we went in the opposite direction.
(to be continued)
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews