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Une Femme Coquette may not sound like anything special—a 9-minute no-budget short film, shot on a borrowed 16mm camera by a 24-year-old amateur with no formal film school training. But the short, which was the subject of our article “Neither lost nor found: On the trail of an elusive icon’s rarest film” back in 2014, has for decades been a sought-after item for art-house buffs and rare movie fiends. Filmed in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1955, it was the first attempt at a narrative film by the iconic French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard—a pivotal figure in the evolution of movie style, who would make his feature debut just five years later, with the hugely influential and perennially cool Breathless.
global arms trade doc trailer
The true story of Friends, Family, and 100 million hits of acid.
A Documentary feature on the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a group of friends out of Southern California that became the largest distributors of LSD and Hash in the world.
I saw La La Land over the holidays, and was kind of underwhelmed. An interesting effort, but didn’t really captivate me. The songs are clever and carry the story along, but aren’t memorable, and are more in a Sondheimesque musical-theater style than pop songs. And in comparison to musicals of yore the supporting characters don’t amount to much; John Legend is no Edward Everett Horton.
I do like musicals, especially for the psychedelic quality they often display, but in thinking about them I realized I was forgetting one of my favorite movies, until I noticed it was finally turning up on TCM: Robert Altman’s Nashville (Sat/Sun at midnight; DVR set.) It’s more like a back stage musical, with the songs occurring as performances instead of intruding into real life scenarios, but you would have to call it a musical of sorts. When it came out in 1975 I thought it was the best thing ever; I sat through it twice in a row. Funny, tragic, political, musical (with the actors writing their own songs.) I haven’t seen it in many years, and have had mixed reactions to some 70’s films I've watched again more recently, so interested to see how it holds up.