The best of the weird, playing only at the stroke of midnight...
Otto Preminger's anti-classic bizarro star-studded pro-LSD comedy-musical, a disastrous flop in its day, but has aged rather well as a wonderfully warped, ironic campfest that includes Jackie Gleason tripping out on acid, and Groucho Marx as "God" (9 years before George Burns!) toking on a joint. The entire film has been uploaded to YouTube, but this version (from a New Zealand TV broadcast) is of higher resolution and quality. If anybody managed to record and upload the widescreen broadcast on TCM in January 2008, please let me know!
So Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There" is earning all those accolades and Oscar buzz. And in a whim and out of guilty pleasure, I'm downloading a series of Carpenters videos on VEOH. And I'm not in an aggro-grindcore-punk-hiphop-garage mood. So then, I give you (IF it remains undeleted for the time being) this classic student film, still technically banned, but handed down from video generation to generation (this looks like a 5th-gen copy) and an underground film fest fave. Alternately creepy, cruel, campy, and poignant. Like "Nosferatu," it was supposed to be destroyed forever many moons ago, but refuses to die.
Exactly what you would think it was...
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