Tag Archives: Ken Russell

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How Bob Harper is raising awareness about heart conditions

DIET RULES TO REDUCE YOUR HEART DISEASE RISK

The American Heart Association releases its list of the key components that make up a heart-healthy eating pattern.

It’s essential to start eating this way early in life and stick with it for the long term, heart experts say.

It’s essential to start eating this way early in life and stick with it for the long term, heart experts say.TODAY Illustration / Getty Images

On Tuesday, the American Heart Association released its list of the 10 key components that make up a heart-healthy eating pattern.

The advice may sound familiar, but the scientific statement — published in the journal Circulation — focuses on “the balance, variety and combination of foods” people eat, rather than individual foods or nutrients.

“It does not need to be complicated, time consuming, expensive or unappealing,” said Alice Lichtenstein, chair of the scientific statement writing group and director of the cardiovascular nutrition team at the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston, in a statement. Read more about the best OTC weight loss pills.

“You can absolutely adapt a heart-healthy diet to different lifestyles, including one that incorporates eating out at restaurants. It might take a little planning, however, after the first few times it can become routine.”

It’s essential to start eating this way early in life and stick with it for the long term, the authors wrote.

 

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Here are their 10 recommendations:

1. Maintain a healthy weight throughout life

This means balancing food and calorie intake with physical activity. The authors advised a healthy dietary pattern that includes portion control coupled with at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity per week. People should eat less as they age because daily energy needs decrease by up to 100 calories with each decade.

2. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables

Diets rich in fruits and vegetables — whether fresh, frozen, canned or dried, but “with the exception for white potatoes” — are associated with a reduced risk of heart disease, the authors noted. They recommended choosing deeply-colored produce such as leafy greens and peaches to get more nutrients.

It’s also better to eat whole fruits and vegetables than juice them because the whole form contains more fiber and makes a person feel fuller. It’s best to get a full range of nutrients from food rather than supplements.

 

3. Choose whole grains

Eating whole grains such as brown rice instead of refined grains such as white rice improves cardiovascular risk factors, studies show. Products made with at least 51% whole grains are typically classified as whole-grain.

4. Include healthy sources of protein

This means mostly protein from plants, such as legumes and nuts, which are also good sources of fiber. Legumes include soybeans (which can be in the form of edamame and tofu), lentils, chickpeas and split peas.

At this time, plant-based meat alternatives require “some caution” because many are ultra-processed and contain added sugar, saturated fat, salt, stabilizers and preservatives, the authors wrote.

Dusty Featured

Blu-ray and DVD Review: Films by Alain Resnais, Jia Zhangke, Ken Russell & more!

MurielMuriel, or The Time of Return (1963)
Criterion Collection

The third feature film from Alain Resnais often feels like a continuation of the concerns of his previous two (1959’s Hiroshima mon amour and 1961’sLast Year at Marienbad), dealing with the oppressive and disorienting power of memory. Though the ambiguous elisions of Marienbad are legendary, Muriel is the more challenging (and rewarding) film, despite a narrative that’s ostensibly far more straightforward.

Resnais again employs the talents of Delphine Seyrig, who acts as an emotional anchor in a film that deliberately alienates over and over again. Seyrig stars as Hélène, a widow who’s paid a visit by Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kerien), her lover more than 20 years ago. Alphonse is accompanied by a woman he calls his niece, Françoise (Nita Klein), while Hélène lives with her stepson Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thierrée), who she doesn’t see much after his return from fighting in the Algerian War.

An antique dealer whose showroom is her apartment, Hélène lives among countless objects that aren’t really her own, and the state of her living quarters seems to represent her own mind, cluttered with detritus from other eras. In Resnais’ audacious opening, he prepares us to be challenged, rapidly cutting between many of the objects in a dizzying barrage that spatially disorients while giving us some sense of Hélène’s state of mind.

From that point on, the film’s editing isn’t as obviously aggressive, but after lulling us somewhat with a measured dinner scene with the four principals, the film suddenly slips into a much more elusive form, darting from scene to scene in an order that seems chronological, but with events that feel completely disconnected. (The script by Jean Cayrol specifies the film’s events take place over a two-week period, but the film doesn’t obviously let on to that.)

Muriel is a film that necessitates multiple viewings — not so much to comprehend, as to appreciate the nuances Resnais brings to his depiction of the crushing effect of suddenly dredged-up memories. It doesn’t take multiple viewings to feel the weight of the film’s title, and its central, most horrific memory, when we discover that Muriel isn’t one of Bernard’s girlfriends, but his connection to the trauma of war. Here, a trauma that one perpetrates has a stinging clarity that a trauma one merely experienced does not.

Criterion’s Blu-ray release presents Muriel in a 1080p, 1.66:1 transfer that markedly improves over the Masters of Cinema DVD release in terms of clarity and detail. There has been some grumbling online about the color timing, and there is a slightly sickly, greenish-tealish-yellowish tinge to the image. How far this diverts from the original color timing, I can’t say; at this point, the clear upgrade in image quality makes this the best home video option available, color issues notwithstanding. The uncompressed mono soundtrack is fairly flat, but doesn’t exhibit any prominent noise issues.

The supplements here are mostly of the archival variety. There are three brief excerpts: Pieces of a 1980 TV documentary on Resnais with contributions from Cayrol, a 1969 TV interview with Seyrig, where she contrasts her characters in Marienbad and Muriel, and a 1963 TV interview with composer Hans Werner Henze, who explains why Resnais helped him feel comfortable composing for film. Newly recorded, and more substantial, is an interview with scholar François Thomas, who discusses the film’s themes and the cultural environment in which it was released. Perhaps most essential is the insert essay by scholar James Quandt, whose efficient yet dense unpacking of a number of the film’s ideas is superb.

Criterion Collection / 1963 / Color / 1.66:1 / 116 min / $39.95

MountainsMountains May Depart (2016)
Kino Lorber

The great Jia Zhangke continues to chronicle the state of contemporary China, and in his latest feature, Mountains May Depart, he does so by looking both backward and forward. A time-hopping triptych that chronicles the breakdown of a family, Mountains May Depart is a moving melodrama that occasionally feels strained as it seeks to correlate the intensely personal with a larger societal malaise.

Jia’s bewitching images, in which the extraordinary can suddenly overtake the mundane, and a richly interior performance from wife and longtime collaborator Zhao Tao help to overcome any feelings that the film’s observations about capitalism are too on-the-nose.

As the film progresses, slick materialism becomes more ubiquitous and more alienating, and the film’s color scheme shifts into cooler and paler tones. The aspect ratios get wider too; Jia uses 1.33:1 for the segment in 1999, 1.85:1 for 2014 and 2.35:1 for 2025.

Mountains May Depart isn’t exactly a paean to the past, but there’s an unmistakable sense of nostalgia that blankets the first segment, if only in the luxuriousness of the imagery. Interspersed with documentary footage Jia shot during roughly the same timeframe, the opening act details a love triangle between Shen Tao (Zhao) and her two suitors, coal miner Liangzi (Liang Jing Dong) and the wealthy, callous industrialist Zhang (Zhang Yi).

Shen Tao cares deeply for Liangzi, but she also longs for change (a New Year’s dance to the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” reinforcing her yearning) and understands that Zhang offers a much better chance at it. Zhang, who could nearly twirl his mustache despite being clean-shaven, is not a subtly written or performed character, but Zhao’s conflicted performance makes her choices believable. Throughout the film, Zhao’s performance is situated on heartbreak, whether she’s currently experiencing it or merely anticipating it.

As time progresses, the film shifts its attention to Shen Tao’s son, whose anglicized moniker is the not-so-understated Dollar (Dong Zijian), and the film’s final sequence suffers for the relative absence of Zhao. Fortunately, the wonderful Sylvia Chang appears as Dollar’s college professor, and later, his unlikely companion as he faces disillusionment with school and his distant relationships with his parents. Set in a gleaming, sterile Melbourne, this final segment is the least emotionally acute, but the most effective at communicating Jia’s apprehension about unrelenting modernization.

Kino’s Mountains May Depart Blu-ray offers a largely excellent transfer, though the 1.33:1 segment is slightly pictureboxed. Jia’s archival footage, blocky and flat, is readily apparent, but the rest of the film is crisp and detailed, with particularly vibrant colors in the first segment. A 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is mostly subdued, but shows off some dynamic range during a few key moments. Optional English subtitles accompany the first two segments’ Mandarin, but not the largely English dialogue in the final part.

Extras include a lengthy and somewhat dry, but informative Q&A with Jia at the New York Film Festival moderated by Dennis Lim, a trailer and a booklet with an essay by programmer and critic Aliza Ma, who offers a helpful synopsis of Jia’s career and the way his early work dovetails with his recent output.

Kino Lorber / 2016 / Color / 1.33:1, 1.85:1 and 2.35:1 / 126 min / $34.95

StuffStuff and Dough (2001)
Second Run

Though his cachet among cinephiles in the US might be slightly less than Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) or Corneliu Porumboiu (Police, Adjective), Cristi Puiu is still a major figure in the Romanian New Wave, and he beat both of them to the feature-film punch, releasing Stuff and Dough in 2001. Considered by some to be the first major entry in Romania’s then-fledgling movement, the film is now getting some wider exposure thanks to Second Run, whose DVD release represents the first time Stuff and Dough has been available on English-friendly home video.

Stuff and Dough is not an outlier when it comes to much of modern Romanian film. Its narrative is spare, its camerawork straightforward and its tone is dryly, darkly comic before veering into nervy, if low-key, suspense mode. It’s a road movie that takes the road seriously; the majority of the running time is spent with three characters in a van, trekking to Bucharest from their small town on a trip that seems deadly dull.

It’s not, of course; the boredom is sharply punctuated by flurries of violence as it becomes clear the trio is being pursued by some nasty characters. This might come as a shock to them, but it’s deeply expected for the audience, who’s witnessed the none-too-bright Ovidiu (Alexandru Papadopol) agree to transport “medical supplies” for the almost comically shady Ivanov (Razvan Vasilescu) at the beginning of the film.

Ovidiu would like to get out from underneath his parents’ roof, and the money from Ivanov would go a long way toward that goal, but he’s not exactly the most ambitious guy. Puiu’s best scene is an early one in which Ivanov grills Ovidiu about the planned trip, the steps he will take and even his bathroom habits, but no matter how stern Ivanov’s commands get, Ovidiu remains blissfully disconnected from the conversation.

That humor doesn’t really carry over, and the story doesn’t get sketched out much beyond the opening act, so there are few surprises on the drive, though it stays engaging thanks to the naturalistic performances from Papadopol and Dragos Bucur and Ioana Flora as Ovidiu’s friend Vali and Vali’s girlfriend Bety. The film’s ultimate observations about aimless youth scraping by in a depressed economy aren’t earth-shattering, but the film does resonate as a truthful portrait of a particular point in the country’s history.

Second Run’s DVD features a sharp new high-def transfer, approved by Puiu, in 1.85:1. Extras include his 2004 short Cigarettes and Coffee, a seemingly low-stakes naturalistic two-hander that won the Berlin Film Festival’s Best Short award, and a newly filmed interview with Puiu, who discusses his entry into the world of cinema and some of his influences. A booklet with an essay by critic Carmen Gray is also included.

Second Run / 2001 / Color / 1.85:1 / 90 min / £12.99

CrimesCrimes of Passion (1984)
Arrow Video

For many filmmakers, the garish, sleazy and unhinged Crimes of Passion could be the kind of baffling cult item that forever sticks out in their filmography. For Ken Russell, it’s just another movie.

The brilliant British director continually pushed his films to the limits of good taste and beyond, so there’s nothing particularly shocking about the film’s luridness, even if it’s notably more explicit than his string of outrageous period pieces in the 1970s. Barry Sandler’s script whiplashes from campy sex crime thriller to leaden suburban satire, but Russell’s steady directorial hand balances the tonal jackknifing. There’s no question that the film’s domestic subplot compares poorly to the film’s main thrust, but Russell credibly ties it all together.

The second Hollywood film Russell made after the contentious Altered States (1980), Crimes of Passion stars then-megastar Kathleen Turner as China Blue, a prostitute with a flair for the theatrical who lives a double life as a prominent fashion designer by day. In the film’s opening scene, China Blue’s encounter with a john is filmed as if she’s performing for the film’s viewers, her boudoir an invisible proscenium, and that performative, exaggerated style continues throughout her fascinating, completely exposed turn.

Compared to Turner, no one is going to really match up, though Anthony Perkins’ nitrate-sniffing, sexually frenzied priest — like a less religious Hazel Motes — certainly comes close. Less up to the task is John Laughlin as Bobby Grady, a milquetoast stuck in a sexless marriage who becomes tangled up in China Blue’s world of fantasy when he’s hired to tail her real-world alter ego.

The film tends to grind to a halt whenever Bobby and his wife Amy (Annie Potts) are onscreen, the script’s obvious broadsides against the emptiness of middle-class values not livened by their whiny performances. (A more potent barb is the music video the couple watches on TV of Rick Wakeman’s “It’s a Lovely Life,” the lyrics not so much sung as shrieked by Maggie Bell.)

Arrow Video’s excellent Blu-ray release presents the film in a 1080p, 1.85:1 transfer sourced from a new 2K restoration. Both the uncut theatrical release and a slightly extended director’s cut are included; the extended cut features additional scenes from a lesser source, though the quality drop-off is less drastic than expected. Arrow’s transfer is a knockout, perfectly showcasing the film’s electric blues and pinks and displaying exceptional clarity, sharpness and damage clean-up. Audio is a reasonably dynamic uncompressed mono track.

On-disc extras include newly filmed interviews with screenwriter Sandler and composer Wakeman, both of whom enthusiastically recount their participation, along with an archival commentary track with Russell and Sandler, 20 minutes of rough-looking deleted and extended scenes with optional Sandler commentary, an MTV music video of “It’s a Lovely Life” and the theatrical trailer.

Arrow Video / 1984 / Color / 1.85:1 / 107 min / $39.95

CemeteryCemetery of Splendor (2016)
Strand Releasing

In the latest film from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the characters are stuck between the past and the present, between sleeping and waking and between a higher plane and one stubbornly still of this mortal coil. So no, it’s not a major departure for the Thai filmmaker, but it’s still a welcome return from Joe, who hadn’t released a proper feature since 2010’s hallucinatory Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. (The hour-long doodle Mekong Hotel [2012] doesn’t quite count, though it’s a welcome bonus feature on Strand’s well-appointed Blu-ray.)

Cemetery of Splendor rarely shifts out of that gently dreamlike mode that Weerasethakul has perfected, ambling through patient shots of his hometown Khon Kaen and its many green spaces, canopies of trees stretching out across the frame.

There’s a thin membrane here between the real and the extra-real, as is quickly discovered by Jen (Jenjira Pongpas Widner) when she goes to tend to soldiers afflicted with a mysterious sleeping sickness. Set up in hospital beds in the building that used to be Jen’s school as a child, the seemingly comatose soldiers are being treated with color therapy. The film’s first scene showing tubes of colored light being activated is the closest Weerasethakul gets to dramatically flipping the switch between worlds, the greenery and natural light of the village being suddenly shut out and replaced with glowing, otherworldly cylinders.

Most of the transitions are more casual; Jen watches over Itt (Banlop Lomnoi), who occasionally wakes from his dead-to-the-world sleep with little fuss. Jen learns more about the soldiers’ condition from Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), who claims to be a medium, and a pair of goddesses who’ve shed their heavenly accouterments. It becomes apparent that the school turned hospital is built on an ancient burial ground; time has somehow compressed and associated the soldiers’ fates with that of long-passed kings.

Naturally, Cemetery of Splendor is a beguiling film, but one of its chief pleasures is the way its characters embrace simple delights. The film’s trappings are heady, but its pleasures feel earthly, whether it’s the straightforward humor of a dick joke (sleeping sickness doesn’t prevent erections, apparently) or the way Jen justifies her love for fried bananas or Itt savors a meal from a market food stand.

Strand Releasing doesn’t put out very many of its releases on Blu-ray, but when it does, it tends to do it right. Cemetery of Splendor is granted a luminous 1080p, 1.78:1 transfer that nicely renders the film’s naturalistic color palette. Images are detailed and crisp, with no apparent digital tampering issues to speak of. The 5.1 DTS-HD soundtrack is subtly immersive, and cleanly presents dialogue and music.

Extras include the aforementioned Mekong Hotel in 1080p, a making-of featurette with interviews with Weerasethakul and Widner, a handful of deleted scenes and the theatrical trailer.

Strand Releasing / 2016 / Color / 1.78:1 / 122 min / $32.99

 

 

Dusty Somers is a Seattle-based writer and editor who splits his critical ambitions between writing Blu-ray & DVD reviews and theater criticism. He’s a member of the Online Film Critics Society and Seattle Theater Writers.

 

Ken Russell, 2005

Ken Russell: Two Visits

Making odd or even wrong choices in life, as in art, becomes an aesthetic. – R.B. Kitaj

One makes room in Heaven for all sorts of souls … who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people – Stephen Crane

Ken Russell, 2005

Ken Russell, 2005

Los Angeles, May 1995 – Dinner tonight with Ken Russell at Mexico City restaurant in Los Feliz, around the corner from home. Chatted genially about his recent projects:  the unbelievably dire Yuri Geller TV biopic Mindbender (not one of Ken’s favorites, sucked into it because of an old connection from Robert Stigwood and Tommy days); plus his upcoming version of Treasure Island, to be shot with a camcorder and starring his new wife Hetty Baynes as Long Jane Silver. Wandered onto various topics:  Old Master paintings sunk on the Lusitania (apparently works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian and Monet went down with the ship) the great civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of the Great Eastern and the Clifton Suspension Bridge spanning the Avon Gorge in Bristol … the explosion of tourists in the Lake District which ironically he helped to popularize in The Devils, Women In Love and Tommy. Talked about a project he’s trying to set up with The South Bank Show on the English composer Albert Ketèlbey (1875 – 1959), whose works were tremendously popular in Ken’s youth in the 1930s and 1940s, especially Oriental-themed mini-epics like “In A Persian Market” and “In A Monastery Garden” and the local favorite “ ‘Appy ‘Amstead.”

On the way back to Ken’s hotel we raced through Hollywood in my beat-up Triumph Spitfire with the top down and Ken’s white hair whipping in the night air. He suddenly burst into song, warbling the vocal chorus to “In A Persian Market” at the top of his lungs, for his own delight. God knows what people on the street thought of this mad Englishman, madly chanting “baksheesh … baksheesh!!”  Truly this is why I love Ken.

In the Desert, even more than upon the ocean, there is present death:  hardship is there, and piracies, and shipwreck, solitary, not in crowds, where, as the Persians say, ‘Death is a festival’; — and this sense of danger, never absent, invests the scene of travel with an interest not its own.

The sons of Great Britain are model barbarians – Sir Richard Francis Burton

South Downs, England, May 1995 – Climbed to the top of Chanctonbury Ring this morning; I’m in nearby Findon for the wedding of my high school friend Vincent to his English sweetheart Fiona. Chanctonbury and nearby Cissbury Rings are remains of Iron Age hilltop fortresses:  both command overpowering views of the rolling West Sussex countryside, although Cissbury is slightly more spectacular because of its sheer size, enclosing nearly 65 acres. I tore my pants unnecessarily climbing over a barbed wire fence to get inside Cissbury, without realizing there was an access gate just around the curve of the hill. The massive size of the double ramparts at the top had me confused into thinking they were natural earthenworks, not man made. I spent most of my walk searching for “Roman era ruins” that I’d heard were near the Ring. Finally bumped into a local redheaded girl having a smoke and exercising her large dogs and asked her where the ruins were. “You’re standing on them,” she replied and then trotted off with her hounds, leaving me to my Yankee stupidity. Chanctonbury is accessible only by a brutally steep climb through the wood:  the area inside the ramparts is now off-limits and overgrown, although supposedly still used by a local witches’ coven according to a waitress at the inn I’m staying at. Cissbury, on the other hand, is still open to the winds and the joggers and the dog-walkers and the local cattle which graze along the slopes. On a clear day, I’m told, you can see to the Isle of Wight.

Overheard in a second-hand bookshop in nearby Chichester:  the young owner and his mates arguing passionately about censorship in England of Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, and commenting about the scene in Ridley Scott’s Black Rain where Andy Garcia loses his head as “a beautiful piece of editing.” “It couldn’t happen to a better man,” someone chimed in sarcastically. English second-hand booksellers appear not to be Andy Garcia fans.

Drove out to have lunch with Ken Russell at his country house, Old Tinsley, in the New Forest – so-called “new” because it was planted only a thousand years ago by William the Conqueror, according to Ken. I found him sitting in the greenhouse wearing a straw hat and working on the script for Treasure Island; he writes everything out longhand. Old Tinsley is a 16th century thatched house:  Ken bought it in 1972 and says he’s done all of his screenwriting there since. While he was in the kitchen boiling up spaghetti, he explained to me the difficulties of having an old house in England:  when he wanted to add the greenhouse on beside the kitchen, to give the place more light and space, he contacted the local council – who sent an “unbearable woman” out to see him. After poking into too much of Ken’s business for his liking, she finally gave him clearance to build the greenhouse – but, some time later, a second, even more odious woman, came to visit him from the council. In the course of conversation, Ken mentioned the house wasn’t “listed” – i.e., historically protected under British law. “Well, it should be,” she promptly replied. By the time Ken received the notice of listing – which meant absolutely no changes could be made to the house from a historical preservation point of view – he’d already poured the foundation and paid the non-refundable balance for the greenhouse. He quickly phoned the local supervisor and explained that unless he was allowed to continue, he’d sue the council for the 17,000-pound balance. After a short pause, the supervisor noted the listing papers had been signed by “the wrong person” and so were not legally in effect. Said supervisor quietly asked how long it would take to get the greenhouse up. “About a week,” Ken replied. “Then I’ll get you the correct listing papers in a week,” the supervisor said, and hung up. The papers never actually arrived as it turned out – and now we sit in Ken’s magnificent little greenhouse with two wooden church angels in the corner, and an ultra high tech sound system that he has to cover with a cloth to keep the sun from melting.

During lunch, Ken quizzed me about the American Civil War, asking if it still meant anything to most Americans. He observed that the radicals responsible for the recent bombing in Oklahoma City seemed to share a common motive with the Confederate States – both objected to being told what to do by the Federal government – and he wondered out loud if America would have another civil war. He also mentioned that the British, in his opinion, seemed to have little sympathy for America over the Oklahoma City tragedy since they’d been experiencing IRA attacks for decades while most Americans seemed to side with the IRA.

After lunch, we took a short walk around the garden. The sundial in back was a gift when he married his most recent wife Hetty. He read the time for me, which turned out to be an hour early because sundials don’t correct for daylight savings time.

That afternoon:  climbed up to Cissbury Ring again for a late afternoon farewell to the green English hills and ran into an agitated cow and her calf, apparently separated from the small herd that grazes there. Followed after them until the cow charged up onto the embankment and confronted me. After a minute we both went our separate peaceful ways.

And they led the most pleasurable of lives and the most delectable, till there came to them the Destroyer of delights and the Sunderer of societies and they became as they had never been. – Sir Richard Francis Burton, The Arabian Nights

Los Angeles, late 2006 – It’s several months since Ken and I worked together on his “The Girl With The Golden Breasts” episode of the anthology film Trapped Ashes, which he directed and I wrote & produced. At the end of the episode, to everyone’s surprise, Ken appeared as one of the mad scientists who flash their vampiric female breasts to the camera; he kept the fact that he was playing one of the doctors a secret until we actually shot. During editing he took to calling me “Dennis Scissorhands” for cutting his segment down (the full-length cut was eventually released on the DVD, to Ken’s grudging satisfaction.)

I received word that Ken had suddenly been left homeless: a fire had gutted his beautiful thatched cottage, Old Tinsley, nearly killing his lovely fourth wife, Elize, who managed to escape at the last moment. Later I learn he decided not to rebuild.

Nay, more annoying than the fear which they inspired was the odious extravagance of their equipment, with their gilded sails, and purple awnings, and silvered oars – Plutarch describing the Cilician Pirates

Los Angeles, late November 2011 – I just received word that Ken has passed away. We’d been in touch recently when I helped attach him to direct a planned remake of the 1976 film Alice In Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy, which he was quite excited about.

Although my Triumph Spitfire is long gone, sometimes driving through Hollywood at night with the windows down, when I pass a certain point I can still hear echoes of a mad Englishman chanting “baksheesh … baksheesh!!” for his own wild pleasure.

 

Dennis Bartok is a writer-producer and former programmer at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood. 

 

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