All you have to do is take one look at me, and it’s obvious that I love food, And if you’ve been reading my writing for awhile, it’s also obvious that I love movies about food. Thus I was immediately drawn to Les Blank’s Yum, Yum, Yum! A Taste Of Cajun And Creole Cooking.
When I was in college, I had a roommate who was from Louisiana, and he really turned me on to authentic home made cajun-style cooking – Jambalaya. etouffee, and the rest, and one of the things which he taught me, which is also emphasized in this doc is that while many people think of this style of food as simply hot, the real goal is not to burn your mouth with pepper, but to find the right blend of spices to compliment but not overpower the actual flavor of what you are serving.
There’s actually an analogy to be made here between this facet of cajun cooking and Les Blank’s film. He manages to fin just the right blend of interviews with both cooks and devotees of the food, local music which forms the soundtrack for the film, and shots of the food itself – both its creation and the final product – to make a quite appetizing concoction.
So whether you’re a fan of food, food films, cajun music, or simply of documentaries, Yum Yum Yum!, with a short running time of just over thirty minutes, should definitely whet your taste buds for more..
This past Christmas my son got me a Mill Creek box set called Awesomely Cheesy Movies. 100 movies on 24 disks, it’s actually a combination of two of their earlier released sets, “The Swinging Seventies”, and “The Excellent Eighties”. 
Back to the 70s this time around with movie three of disk one 1974’s F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Last of the Belles”. (to give it its full on screen title).
Okay, I’ll admit here that I’ve never really bee a fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories. I ‘t really say why, but they’ve just never clicked with me. So I’ve never rea his story “The Last of the Belles”, and can’t comment on how good an adaptation of the story the “movie within a movie” presented here is. Nor do I know enough about life of the author to comment on the accuracy of the biographical details. Insteadi I simply have to take the presentation at face value.
I’d love to at least be able to say that there are performances within the movie that redeem it, but honestly, even with the presence of Blythe Danner as Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda and the usually at least entertaining Susan Sarandon as her younger fictional avatar, there’s still just nothing to make it stand out at all.
From the silent era on, Fritz Lang has been one of Germany’s most celebrated and interesting film makers. Most film fans likely know him for his ingenious silent science fiction epic Metropolis, or from his classic Peter Lorre-starring noir M.
The film opens in a noisy print shop where we find disgraced police detective Hofmeister attempting to uncover a criminal conspiracy. After a shoot out with the criminal gang, Hofmeister escapes and calls his former boss, Inspector Lohmann. While he is attempting to explain what he has discovered, Hofmeister’s home is broken into and after shots are exchanged, the detective disappears, only to later turn up in the same asylum as Mabuse, somehow driven inexplicably insane.
Interestingly, it seems that despite the mad doctor’s incarceration, his criminal gang is still active and is still carrying out crimes just as outlined in Mabuse’s writings, a fact noticed by Baum’s colleague, Dr. Kramm when he stumbles upon pages of Mabuse’s writing which he inadvertently knocks from Baum’s desk.
Meanwhile, Inspector Lohmann has become suspicious that Mabuse may somehow be connected to the crime which is running rampant through the city, so he goes to the asylum to see what he can perhaps learn from the doctors or even from Mabuse himself. However, upon arriving, Lohmann is informed that Mabuse died earlier that very morning. Lohmann is shown the body and is assured that Mabuse is not only certainly dead but that there is no way that the body can be any other than that of the doctor.
From this point on, all bets are off as the crime spree continues and the increasingly harried police inspector does his best to figure out exactly what is going on and who can possibly be the master of the criminal gang.
Let’s talk 70s blaxploitation movies for a minute, shall we?
What would happen if you took the kids from The Breakfast Club and stranded them together on a deserted island with only a backpack full of Spam and vodka? Oh, and what if the island also turned out to be the meeting place for gunrunners looking to make a connection?
Okay, so, the plot: It’s prom night, (or, actually I suppose it’s actually graduation night, though the party seems more prom-ish) and post-dance, a group of friends board the plane of rich kid Kevin to head to a weekend of debauchery on a tropical island. Unfortunately for them, the plane is caught in a storm, and crashes into the sea. Though the kids all survive, the pilot is killed in the wreck. They manage to fin a lifeboat an make it to shore on what appears to be a small deserted island.
So let’s see: We’ve got eight horny teenagers alone, and a lot of booze. Of course nothing untoward is going to happen, right? Yeah, right. It’s not too long before what begins as an innocent game of spin the bottle turns into strip spin the bottle. However, as the inhibitions and clothes are left behind, old resentments and tensions come to the fore. There are arguments and fist fights, hook ups and break ups.
It turns out that the boat belongs to a group of gun runners who are awaiting the arrival of their buyers. Upon seeing the kids waving to them from the shore, the bad guys decide the best bet is to pretend to be there to rescue them, bring them aboard their boat, then have some “fun” with them. And yes, by “fun” I mean exactly what you think I mean.
Part of the fun of Out Of Control is seeing some of the young performers featured. The lead is played by Betsy Russell, who would play many of the same type of role during the eighties, but is probably best known to audiences today as one of the leads in the later films of the Saw series. Martin Hewitt is Keith, still riding on his fame from costarring in Endless Love with Brooke Shields. Andrew J. Lederer features as Elliot, who starts the film as the token, somewhat obnoxious “fat kid”, but one of the pluses of the movie is that he is allowed to move beyond that stereotypical role (which, in any typical horror flick of the era would have seen him killed off very early) to become a stronger than expected character who participates in the ensuing heroism as much as the rest of the more buff male cast.
Perhaps most surprising among the young cast, though is a very young Sherilynn Fenn who is given an “introducing” credit here even though she’d already had a couple of films released by this time, Fenn is, of course, best known especially to genre fans for her role as Audrey Horne in David Lynch’s enigmatic television series Twin Peaks..
Okay, confession time: Back in the early eighties, I was a huge fan of General Hospital. For those of you who were not around at the time, it might be surprising to know the cultural impact that a daytime soap opera had.
All of which is to say that it’s easy to see why Anthony Geary was chosen to play Dr. Kyle Richards in the TV movie Intimate Agony. He certainly had enough of a background in delivering the necessary medical information to play the role while at the same time being well qualified to handle the more melodramatic aspects of the film.
The movie also prominently features Mark Harmon and his terrific 80s porn ‘stache as the island’s resident tennis pro and womanizer who, upon finding out that he, too has the dreaded disease, wonders just what the future may hold for him since he feels reduced to, as he puts it, an overpaid tennis shoe salesman.
I mentioned at the start that Anthony Geary was particularly suited for this role because of his role as a doctor on General Hospital. This is especially true because throughout the film he is required to lecture his patients (and anyone else he can get to give him an ear) about not only the angers of the disease, but also possible treatments and the best way to get on with living a “relatively normal lifestyle”.
In the end, Intimate Agony is not exactly a bad film, but it does come across as something of an Afterschool Special for grown-ups. With Geary’s frequent lectures on the disease (culminating in a community-wide meeting for those suffering from the disease an/or wanting to learn more) it works overtime to get its message across. Still, there is enough going on in the community and enough good character work that it is not completely bogged down by its subject matter.
There are movies that rely on car chases, such as the Fast and Furious series I referenced in the title. There are also movies that heavily feature car chases as part of their plot. One of the most notable is The French Connection. Another personal favorite is the over-the-top chase scene in The Blues Brothers.
Robert Bresson is one of those film makers I’ve hear a lot of praise for, but I’ve never actually seen any of his movies.
The pair proceed to a local frame shop, where, despite the clerk’s initial hesitance, she takes the bill and gives them change. When the store’s owner arrives, he immediately recognizes the bill as fake and takes her to task for accepting it, whereupon she immediately reminds him that earlier in the week he had also accepted two counterfeit bills. The owner decides that rather then report the incidents to the police he will simply pass all three bills along to some unsuspecting soul.
That “unsuspecting soul” turns out to be Yvon Targe, a young man who presents the shop owner with a bill for delivering heating oil. Unfortunately for Yvon, the bill is recognized as fake by a waiter at a restaurant, and Yvon is arrested for trying to pass counterfeit bills.
Finally, out of desperation, Yvon agrees to be the getaway driver for a bank robbery. The police manage to thwart the robbery, and while he is trying to make his own escape, Yvon is arrested. He is sentenced to three years in prison. During his time in jail, Yvon learns of the death of his daughter, and eventually receives a letter from his wife informing him that she is leaving him and moving on with her life
Bresson has a very interesting visual style that at first can seem a bit off-putting. There are times when he seems to focus more on objects than people, such as the scene where a group of four women in the prison are inspecting letters being sent to he prisoners. Instead of making the faces of the women the focal point of the scene as one might expect, Bresson centers his camera on the plastic bins in which the letters are delivered with the women seated in a circle around it.
Another interesting feature of the film is Bresson’s tendency toward off- screen action. This is especially apparent in the bank robbery scene where the focus throughout remains almost entirely on Yvon waiting in the car as opposed to what is happening inside or outside of the bank. We get just enough of the proceedings to follow what is going on, but the emphasis is on Yvon and his reactions.
The first time I watched the 1971 Charlton Heston-starring The Omega Man I actually didn’t.
And it was even worse if something you wanted to watch conflicted with something your parents wanted to see, because it was obvious who was going to win that little fight. Actually, there wasn’t really going to be a fight. (Oh, yeah, one other thing I forgot to mention earlier about this time: there was also no such thing as watching something you wanted to on a computer or iPad or phone or whatever. Remember, we’re talking about a time before home computers or the internet. Yeah, I know, it’s a wonder we were able to survive.)
At the same time as I was a young sci-fi/horror movie fan, I was also a fan of the early pulp characters such as The Shadow and Doc Savage. I had become a fan of these characters through a series of paperbacks that were being released at the time which reprinted those early pulp stories, and which the local library would sporadically get in.
Fortunately, I eventually did.
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