A Visual Summary of Starbabe

Starbabe is an American film from 1977 and was directed by Jack Genero

There is a sweet spot when it comes to Bollywood musicals and Aadmi Aur Insaan is nestled right in it. It was made in 1969, during a period when India was producing movies with the perfect blend of kitsch, glam, traditional Indian culture, and an enthusiasm for modern-day progress. Electric guitars and violins meet sitars and tabla. Leopard print pill-box hats meet saris. The film opens with the production company’s old credits immediately followed by the new ones, as seen below.

Sadko was directed by Aleksandr Ptushko in 1953. It was an adaptation of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera, Sadko which in turn was based on even older Russian mythology. The story itself is unremarkable, a typical hero’s journey with swords, magic, and monsters but visually Sadko is anything but typical.

In Russian art, whether it is a film like Ivan The Terrible, or an opera like Boris Godunov, or a Russian Orthodox Icon painting there is a tradition of using tableaux. Actors are assembled in an ornate and carefully composed images, the camera, as well as the actors, stay relatively still, and…

As a film, Electric Dragon 80.000 V is a bizarre onslaught of sound and fury. As a Japanese film, it’s not that out of the ordinary. With the precedent’s set by films like Tetsuo, Akira, and Wild Zero the frantic antics of Electric Dragon 80.000 V don’t seem quite as insane.

Sogo Ishii’s film is more like a poem than prose. It grabs on to a few themes and shakes them furiously in your face. Electric Dragon 80.000 V is 90% style and 10% content, but the style is intense enough and creative enough to keep you engaged.

It is difficult to move after watching Óscar Catacora’s 2017 film Eternity. It takes a moment or two to find your way out of its pall. There is nothing like the simple drama of two humans trying to survive to completely grip you. Eternity takes place in one location and has only two people anything more would have just been decoration.

The film may have been simple in its ingredients but the curious nature of the film’s presentation has it hover between the personal and symbolic. There is an intense intimacy that we feel with the individual characters but there…

Body Troopers is a Norwegian Children’s film from 1996. It may be billed as a children’s film, and have children as the main characters but there were some parts that would have scared me half to death were I younger than 12 or 13. Of course, it’s subjective but I was surprised at the intensity of some scenes.

It was directed by Vibeke Idsøe but it is the set and costume designers who deserve top billing. I was unable to find the full credits online so I went back and watched the credits at the end of the film. They…

Let’s go south of the border and picture us a little scene. It’s a sweltering hot day in the Mexican countryside. The buzzards glide low over a smokey cantina where 5 sweaty men sit chewing their cigars and sipping warm beer. They are arguing over something, let’s listen in.

Writer 1 slams his hand on the table rattling the half-empty bottles and scaring away the flies, “No, that’s a terrible idea, we should make a movie like The Creature From The Black Lagoon. We could make a killing with a costume like that! I know this pond where…”

Writer 2…

The Wizard of Oz must be confusing to a young child. You have the good witch, and the bad witch, and the witch’s sister. Then there’s Oz who is kind of like a witch and then all the supporting roles, and musical numbers. Watching The Wizard of Oz as a seven year old must be a lot like how I felt watching The Land of Many Perfumes as a 52 year old.

The two films are similar in that they are both epic, magical, technicolor, road movies, starring a rag tag bunch of friends determined to get to their destination…