Sharpen your pencils and crack open those books, it's time for another session of hoopla Film School!
Few places in this world are as cinematic as New York. For decades, filmmakers have feverishly chronicled the iconic city, spanning every era, borough, and class bracket in their stories. Whether it's a buoyant Nora Ephron rom-com, or one of Scorsese's blood-soaked mob sagas, there's a New York tale out there for everyone.
Personally, my interest has always leaned toward the New York of the 1970s and '80s, when economic collapse and social turmoil transformed the city into an anarchic haven of vice and Wild West-like lawlessness (at least, that's what it looked like in the movies). Hop a train to hoopla , opens a new windowand revel in the neon-lit sleaze and grime of one of the city's most notorious ages!
Blank City, opens a new window
Caeine Danhier's documentary revisits an era when New York's bankruptcy coincided with the birth of No Wave cinema on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Interviews with the underground film movement's biggest personalities are interspersed with clips from rare early works of maverick filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Lizzie Borden. Although some of the interview subjects tend to wax pompous at times, their passion, inventiveness, and creativity in the face of abject poverty and meager resources make for a fun and invigorating story.
After enduring two sexual assaults in a single day, a mute young woman takes to the streets of New York with a .45 caliber pistol and a thirst for revenge, targeting any predatory men unfortunate enough to cross her path. For all its low-rent trappings, this exploitation film from Bronx native Abel Ferrara has a strange elegance to it, with thoughtful cinematography and a ferocious, searing performance from 17-year-old Zoë Lund as the speechless vigilante.
Jane Fonda, sporting the same tough little shag haircut from her infamous mugshot, opens a new window, won her first Academy Award for her portrayal of Bree Daniels, a Hell's Kitchen-dwelling call girl involved in a missing persons case. Donald Sutherland turns in a characteristically taciturn performance as John Klute, the buttoned-up suburban cop investigating the disappearance. While the film doesn't quite succeed as a thriller due to a convoluted plot and leisurely pace, it's effortlessly salvaged by the intelligent, hauntingly vulnerable performance by Fonda and an unusual but absorbing romance between the two leads.
After learning that a cast member of his film The Exorcist was responsible for a series of vicious murders that terrorized New York's gay population in the late '70s, director William Friedkin was inspired to adapt the story into a film of its own. The result was Cruising, starring Al Pacino as a cop who goes deep undercover in the city's gay leather club scene to catch a killer. It was widely panned and protested upon its release, and rumor has it Al Pacino still won't talk about the film more than 30 years later (probably because of a certain amyl nitrate-fueled dance scene he would like us to forget). In short, it's exactly the kind of wild, garish, semi-embarrassing time capsule of a film that I live for.
Class dismissed!
