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Posts Tagged ‘Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’

Perdita Durango

Thursday, January 6th, 2022

Twenty years ago when I was an enthusiastic but not that good internet movie reviewer I wrote a column called “I have seen the future of Badass pictures,” because I had seen THE DAY OF THE BEAST (1995) and PERDITA DURANGO (1997), the second and third films of Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia. Although the director hasn’t quite become a household name here in the intervening years, he has made many interesting films, of which I’ve reviewed 800 BULLETS (2002), FERPECT CRIME (2004) and THE LAST CIRCUS (2010). He’s still going strong, for example I’ve heard good things about his recent TV show 30 Coins.

For the holidays I rewatched the Christmas-Eve-set THE DAY OF THE BEAST (it held up – I wrote about it a little bit on Letterboxd) and I’d been meaning to revisit PERDITA DURANGO for quite some time. Reviewing Javier Bardem’s first English language movie, where he plays a human-sacrificing psycho who looks like this…


…as a followup to his more Oscar-baity turn in BEING THE RICARDOS is the sort of thing that amuses me, so I pulled the trigger.

PERDITA DURANGO is based on a 1992 book called 59° and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango by Barry Gifford (who co-wrote the script with de la Iglesia and two others). It’s part 3 in the Sailor and Lula series, part 1 being the basis of WILD AT HEART. (Isabella Rossellini played Perdita in David Lynch’s movie.) (read the rest of this shit…)

A Rage in Harlem

Monday, May 3rd, 2021

It’s that time of year again. The time when the sun comes out and my instincts tell me to crawl into a dark theater. It’s also become the time when I take a deeper look at summer movie entertainment of the past. Especially in this strange year, when the vaccines are starting to kick in but an immediate return to normal life seems unlikely, there’s something I find very comforting and fascinating about this form of time travel. I especially like looking at times I remember living in, but when I was too young to see everything that came out or to understand them in the way I would now. It’s partly nostalgia but partly wanting to learn about everything I missed.

It becomes harder to do each year, as there become fewer stretches that I haven’t already mined (or, in the case of anything in this century, that I wasn’t writing about at the time). Fortunately this year we’ve hit the 30th anniversary of a crop of movies from what I think is kind of an interesting transitional period with some cultural shifts in progress. It’s a summer with some fresh territory for me and although I’ve already reviewed what I consider its two most important releases, they’re both monumental enough to justify writing up more than once. (read the rest of this shit…)

Mystery Train (and a visit to Memphis)

Monday, October 6th, 2014

tn_mysterytrainIn NASHVILLE, Robert Altman used the city to represent America in some way. In MYSTERY TRAIN Jim Jarmusch kinda does the same thing with Memphis, but the joke is that it’s three stories about Memphis through the eyes of foreigners. For all they know the whole country hangs Elvis portraits in their hotel rooms.

The first and favorite story is of two Japanese tourists, Jun (Masatoshi Nagase, THE HIDDEN BLADE) and Mitsuko (Yuki Kudo, RUSH HOUR 3) who arrive in Memphis on a train. I know, I thought this was gonna be a remake of MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, or possibly a story about a talking train that solves mysteries, but most of it doesn’t have to do with the train at all. You just see the train going by every once in a while. What the “mystery” part of the title means is, well… an unanswered question.

I like this story because I like these two. Mitsuko is obsessed with Elvis, Jun never misses an opportunity to say that Carl Perkins is better. Fuckin show off. He has a carefully maintained rockabilly rebel persona with slicked back hair, a white undershirt tucked in under a big belt buckle, etc. He’s very stoic, almost never smiles or says something openly nice, but it rarely dampens her enthusiasm. In one great scene she tests his cool by making goofy faces, then putting on alot of lipstick and sloppily smearing it all over his mouth via kiss. He manages to stay completely deadpan with his clown makeup on, smoking a cigarette that she lights for him with her feet. But he gives a tiny smile when she walks away.

That’s mostly what this movie is about, goofy little character moments done very dry and quiet, in long takes. So it’s a Jim Jarmusch movie. (read the rest of this shit…)