L.I.E. ONE-HUNDRED!!!! Where No LIE Has Gone Before!

ONE HUNDRED POSTS!!!

Thanks to loyal readers and friends!

Your feedback and comments keep me going, and I really regret not being able to post as much as I would like.

That said, since I’ve subtitled this post “Where No LIE Has Gone Before!” it will be illustrated with some of the Star Trek images that I’ve had clogging my computer for too long.

I wasn’t going to use a picture or a cake, or the actual number “100.”

I love the original Trek—it was the show that Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea should have been.

The Original Trek was really about a U.S. battleship cruising the Pacific, keeping the peace—promoting the benevolent Pax Americana. Voyage was just dopey kids’ stuff—but set on the U.S. Navy’s most super-science submarine! Voyage should have been about subverting Castro and destroying the crops of Laos, not lobstermen, phony lizards and atom bomb swallowing whales! (Although that was a cool episode…) 

For the reviews of August and September (and more Trek pix, both from the show and our nation’s cosplayers), please read on:

The Bluesmobile Still Needs Gasoline: Elwood, His Car and the Movies of July 2013

For me, one of the most potent bits of evidence pointing to the veracity that the Blues Brothers were in fact “on a mission from God,” was the almost-heroic death of the Bluesmobile.

My New Favorite Movie: 2006’s “Aachi & Ssipak”

If you are in any way, shape or form a fan of weirdness, then you owe it to yourself to see 2006’s Aachi & Ssipak—

Hilarious, action-packed animation from Korea as punk hoodlums battle government killer-cyborgs, the mutant Diaper Gang and porn-obsessed gangsters to make it in a future where poop is money!

Coming soon to a theater near you! (If you live anywhere near Brooklyn, that is…)

LIE #97: Pacific Rim! Premingerliciousness! And the Movies of June—Finally!

Any gripes against Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) are sniggling ones: For the amount of money spent—and that bread is all on-screen—this is about as perfect a giant monster vs. giant robot flick as you’ll find.

(This, more, and the films of June, all below)

Battlin’ Babs From Brooklyn Conquers the West!

When feisty Barbara Stanwyck’s hard-as-nails, incredibly successful businesswoman is blinded by love for the first time in her hardscrabble life, her selfish and immature younger brother takes the opportunity to ruin her empire.

Sounds kind of modern, right?

Well, it’s as close to a “Douglas Sirk” film that Sam Fuller would ever come to: 1957’s Forty Guns.

But since it’s Stanwyck and Fuller, it’s practically perfect.

Harry Harrison’s “Bill the Galactic Hero” and the Return of Alex Cox: Huzzah!

Despite—or because of—directing Repo Man, one of the greatest films ever made, Alex Cox is one of those filmmakers who just don’t seem to make enough movies.

So it was with joy that I heard that, via Kickstarter funding, Cox would be adapting one of my favorite books, the hilarious science fiction satire, Bill, the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison.

LIE #94: Heatwave Quintet—“Blind Beast” & Friends!

Thermonuclear heatwave meltdown in effect, but no summertime-popcorn-Propaganda-Machine-brainwashing here at LERNER INTERNATIONAL, no siree!

These five films are thought-provoking and controversial, yet brush against the Genre Zone quite successfully—after Blind Beast, we look at the recently released Upstream Color, the long-awaited follow-up to cult favorite Primer; then Larry Cohen’s 1977 exploitation biopic The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, best watched if you put yourself in a late-1970s mindset. We conclude with reviews of lost early-1980s UFOlogy masterpiece Wavelength and its abducted aliens; finishing with Kuroneko, another Japanese film, with bloodthirsty yokai seeking revenge.

Blind Beast (1969; Yasuzo Masumura) WOW, what a film!

“Why can’t touching be an art form?!?"

An insane blind sculptor kidnaps a young model that he’s become obsessed with—in order to recreate the “perfect “ female form in Yasuzo Masumura’s unique erotic horror masterpiece Blind Beast. The madman cries out, “A new art form, by and for the blind!”—and he means it!