The Screengrab

All summer long we’ve been flipping back the calendar to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse thirty years ago. Today is Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer, and the official grand finale of…The Summer of ’78!

A Wedding

Release Date: August 29, 1978

Cast: Desi Arnaz, Jr., Carol Burnett, Geraldine Chaplin, Lillian Gish, Mia Farrow

The Buzz: If your only problem with Nashville was that you thought there just weren’t enough characters – have we got a movie for you!

Keywords: Wedding, Dancing, Dental Braces, Unplanned Pregnancy, Frog, Greenhouse

The Plot: This is about as plotless as it gets, even by Robert Altman standards. The title is no lie – it’s a wedding.

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3 WOMEN (1977), Not Directed By David Lynch



Like any number of David Lynch films, 3 Women starts in one genre, telling one story about a certain group of characters, then at some point the acid kicks in, reality shifts, and if you went out to get popcorn or go to the bathroom, you’d be forgiven for coming back in and thinking you’d wandered into the wrong theater (or living room) given the batshit craziness that’s replaced whatever movie you'd previously been watching. In this Altman phantasmagoria, inspired, like many if not all of Lynch’s films, by a dream, Shelley Duvall plays a chirpy sanitarium worker who makes the mistake of taking in spooky, Carrie-era co-worker Sissy Spacek as a roommate, only to see her previously unexamined life unravel as she and Spacek swap personalities with each other (and maybe even a few other people, possibly including the third of the 3 Women, a mysterious desert mural artist played by Janice Rule). Things get trippier in the final twenty minutes than Quintet and Popeye combined (or, for that matter, any other Altman film I can think of), and if none of it seems to make a lick of sense, well, Altman didn’t entirely understand the ending either, though apparently he had a “theory,” possibly involving all the film's recurring twins and triplets, the red lampshade, the Cowboy, the homeless man behind the Winkie’s, the family of rabbits, the creepy, white-faced specter of Robert Blake and...wait...what was I talking about?  Oh no...it...is...happening...again...

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One of our all-time favorite blog names is Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule; it really sums up the finest things in life in one pithy phrase. This week, proprietor Dennis Cozzalio has outdone himself with a mammoth rep report of his own, dedicated to specialty screenings in Los Angeles over the next month or so. A Mario Bava retrospective and a timely “Heist Films” festival are among the highlights, along with a series at the UCLA Film and Television Archives “highlighting the work of one of the pre-CGI greats of special effects, L.W Abbott. If you are of a certain age (like me), Abbott is probably directly or indirectly responsible for some of the most awe-inspiring images you eve saw in a movie theater, and maybe even one of two of your most indelible nightmares as well. Abbott started in the film business as an assistant cameraman on no less than Sunrise, ended as a consultant on the physical effects for 1941, and spent some of the multitude of years in between, for 1957 to 1972, as the head of 20th Century Fox’s special photographic effects department. The series, entitled ‘Wire, Tape, and Rubber Band Style: The Effects of L.B. Abbott’, is an unbelievable gathering of amazing imagery (and occasional patches of some clunky dialogue, if I remember correctly) that effectively illustrates the great talent Abbott summoned to create some of the most spectacular sequences in movies during the 60s and 70s.”

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