(no subject)

[jfb]

Okay, let's get this started. Here are some videotapes you might like, in roughly the order in which they entered my life:

• The Inspector General. Danny Kaye is a con man's apprentice who is mistaken for the Inspector General by a small, corrupt Russian town. Ever wonder how Americans satisfied the urge for a Jim Carrey movie before Jim Carrey movie came along?
  
• True Stories. David Byrne's deadpan fictional documentary about a Texas town's "celebration of special ness". No box. morganita
  
• Crimes and Misdemeanors. From that period of Woody Allen's career after he stopped having to prove himself and before he was consumed by scandal and then banality--just a good solid movie. More explicitly about ideas--in this case, about guilt and sin--than anything else I had encountered at this time in high school. Less a comedy than I remembered--Woody's character makes jokes, but they aren't really played for laughs, so much as a character trait, a nervous tic.
  
• Pet Shop Boys Videography. The videos through 1991. The early ones mostly consist of an ongoing effort to find something for the non-singing Chris Lowe to do, and to make the non-heterosexual Neil Tennant flirt with women. "Left to my own devices" is very simple--Chris and Neil filmed from below a glass floor, and occasionally acrobats hurtle past--and completely entrancing. devildali
  
• Bringing Up Baby. Not, I think, the best pairing of Grant and Hepburn, but still my favorite, for Cary's self-discovery, for Katharine's flashes of earnest vulnerability, and for the self-referential jokes in the jail scene.
  
• Top Hat. What can one say? Astaire and Rogers, dancing cheek to cheek when they're not mistaking identities right and left. And Edward Everett Horton! And Eric Blore as his subversively subservient manservant! Too good.
  
• The Wrong Trousers. Wallace and Gromit foil a robbery attempt by a sinister penguin. Hilarious.
  
• Ten early Hitchcock films: Sabotage, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Young and Innocent, Rich and Strange, Murder, The Secret Agent, Number 17, Juno and the Paycock.
  
• The Unbelievable Truth. Hal Hartley was one of my great joys in the mid-90s when I first started really discovering cinema. I haven't actually seen a new movie by him in six years (since I moved to California...), but he's still the first name I look for when trying to assess someone else's cinematic compatibility with me. In lieu of a plot summary, David Thomson: "Hal Hartley is offbeat enough to be one of his own characters--an odd, distracted independent filmmaker who comes to town (well, not quite town--rather more that quality of shabby suburbia he knows from Long Island), attracts some good-looking but disaffected people, and draws them into some modest fable of ironic reversal)."
  
• Safe. A suburban housewife mysteriously becomes allergic to her environment (maybe?), then goes to a spa (or cult?) to recover. Short plot, made great by Julianne Moore's amazing performance, Todd Haynes's creation of a constant tone of quiet menace, and the film's refusal to take a stance on what's really going on.
  
• Spice World. Roger Ebert writes, "So lacking in human characteristics are the Girls that when the screenplay falls back on the last resort of the bankrupt filmmaking imagination--a live childbirth scene--they have to import one of their friends to have the baby." I loved it.
  
• She's All That. Freddie Prinze, Jr., and Rachael Leigh Cook in a Pygmalion tale, kind of a mess but for its quirks my favorite of the late-90s crop of teen comedies. Also for Matthew Lillard and Anna Paquin and Kevin Pollak's always confident, always wrong questions to Jeopardy answers in the background.
  
• The Bald Witch Project. There were many, many parodies. This one, from here in the South Bay, had more laughs than most.
  
• Coven. By Mark Borchardt, subject of the documentary American Movie. He's got a good eye. 40 min., B&W. Signed ("Thanks Erik!"). cwage
  
• Miss Folk America, a live "schlock opera" by Faith Soloway and starring numerous luminaries of the Boston-area singer-songwriter scene, among them Jennifer Kimball, Kris Delmhorst, Catie Curtis, and Meghan Toohey. Very, very funny... if you're in on the jokes.
  
• Arlen Roth: Lap Steel Guitar. Want to learn to play lap steel?
  
• "Breathe In". Promotional video by Frou Frou. People on a bus. eamajyn
  

All are pan-and-scan, and all originals except for "Miss Folk America" which was lovingly bootlegged by marm0t, making it more of a collector's item than the original.


The rules: Everything's free, if I know you, or kind of know you, or you have a good story about why you want it. If you're requesting a bunch of stuff, offer me some money for shipping.

Comments

[jfb.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I'm happy to give stuff away. I definitely don't want more stuff in return. Some cash to cover expenses would be great. No hurry.

I can send you True Stories, oh, Monday, probably? (For media rate I have to go to a live post office.) Send me your address. (mailto:eostrom@drowning.org)

[morganology.livejournal.com]

how about we wait until you post the list of all of the other stuff...and you can send it all at one time?

[jfb.livejournal.com]

It'll be quite a while before I'm through listing everything. And anyway it's probably sensible to send the VHS separately from the DVD separately from the CDs from the books from the tapes. So I'll go ahead and do these now.

[morganology.livejournal.com]

It's like my own personal freecycle!

I'm excited. I should do the same thing--although, I can't seem to part with those things, they are like appendages.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

Hey, thanks for reminding me about Freecycle. Looks like there's a pretty active group around me. That'll make a nice disposal method for some stuff.