Three triple features equals movies all weekend!

March 18, 2005

This post was written by Friday blogger Annie Reid.

Like you, I’ve been feeling a little Maud-lin lately. But she’ll be back soon. In the meantime, I present to you several super special exciting fantasy triple features, as sent in by particularly astute, clever, and/or neurotic readers.

Spike, my fave lady masseuse, recommends the following “Feral Children and Their Adults” Triple Feature:

• City of Lost Children Annie sez: any triple feature that works in this bizarrely glorious film is okay with me. A sinister delight. A razor-blade filled apple of a movie. From the directors of Amelie and Delicatessan. Plus Ron Perlman. Raggamuffins band together with circus misfits to discover what mad scientist is stealing children’s dreams to prolong his youth.

• Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome Annie sez: Sorry, I don’t do Mel Gibson. I haven’t seen this film, so I’m taking it on trust, Spike. Looks like some post-apocalyptic kids build a town out of pig shit, then Mel saves them from Tina Turner. Or something. Apparently somebody wrote this script, and then somebody else decided they should put Mad Max in it. But that doesn’t explain the hit single.

• Village of the Damned – the 1960 version. Annie sez: Good Choice. Children of the Corn. Without the Corn. Suddenly a lot of nice ladies in a wee town of pleasant Brits give birth to beautiful blonde alien children. So what else is new?

Then our girl graceful, a California surfer chick fleeing from Chinese-American overacheivement, shares three “Films About Me”, a.k.a. “Fortune Cookie Triple Feature”, a.k.a. “Triple Happiness in Phoenix Nest”, a.k.a. “Crouching Tiger, Watching Movies”, with helpful commentary:

• DOUBLE HAPPINESS – graceful sez: “90% of the dialogue that comes out of the father character’s mouth has come out of my father’s mouth.”

• PUSHING HANDS – graceful sez: “Substitute my grandmother for the displaced Tai Chi master in this movie and subtract the happy ending and you have my family.”

• THE ROAD HOME – graceful sez: “There is no direct connection to any character in my family, but the mood of waiting is the same. In fact, this book, Waiting by Ha Jin, helped me to better understand my parents’ outlook on life.”

And now you can too, people. Oh, this one has a big fat cathartic weepfest at the end. Stock up on kleenex (TM) and cheap white wine.

And your NYC entertainment scout Adam Ash sends this in:

I’m talking Ingmar Bergman. The absence of God. The presence of the other. The enigma of the double. The pain of being-in-Being. I’m talking “The Silence,” “The Shame,” and “Persona.” An Everest of 20th Century Western Civ. Nary a whiff of the frivolous, the topical, the mereness of stuff, the banality of the quotidian. Only the formidable, gasping, gaping Now. The stubborn, hulking furniture of the interior.
The three B’s: brooding, brutal, bleak. Should you make it a Fantasy Quartet, and throw in “Cries and Whispers,” why, you’ve put yourself in the fatal harm’s way of an inexorable Nordic wringer. More than an aesthetic, moral or spiritual experience: an implosion of all thought and feeling. Art doesn’t come any Higher. If you survive and manage to finally escape into starlight or sunlight, for at least 24 hours everything — the world, your mind, people — will taste like Coca-Cola. Go for it. I dare you.

More? Drop me a line at annie at maudnewton dot com.