Well, my friends, it’s after Labor Day. Time to stop wearing white shoes according to Serial Mom, and time to wrap up the summer retrospective according to me. Some interesting movies that were released at the end of the summer include Richard Rush’s COLOR OF NIGHT (yet another legendarily hated movie at the time time, I thought it was kind of interestingly crazy when I watched it years later) and Roger Avary’s KILLING ZOE (which I’ve always sort of liked but never nearly as much as I wanted to), both released on the 19th. The 26th gave us another Tarantino-connected movie that was a huge deal at the time, Oliver Stone’s NATURAL BORN KILLERS.
I previously reviewed that one so thoroughly that I not only covered the movie, but the earlier script and the making of book, so I’m not going to rehash it much here. I do want to note that Oliver Stone was one of the directors most associated with boomer self analysis – rightly or wrongly, his movies were a big part of the way people my age conceived of the Vietnam War, the JFK assassination, and of course The Doors. But here in the summer of GUMP he was more interested in being contemporary, cutting edge, of-the-moment. I found the movie’s hyperactive collage style annoying at the time, but I can respect it more now, and it was obviously influential for other movies I initially and/or still find annoying like DOMINO and CRANK. His choice to recruit Trent Reznor to produce the soundtrack album proves that the movie is more Lollapalooza than Woodstock. It was also an early foray into cinema for the future Academy Award winning composer (though of course we all know he was in Paul Schrader’s LIGHT OF DAY in 1987, plus “Head Like a Hole” was in CLASS OF 1999 and PRAYER OF THE ROLLERBOYS and “Dead Souls” was in THE CROW).
This finale to the Summer of ’94 series will focus on a triptych of movies with this sort of generational torch passing as part of their plot. They are stories about young people and the lessons they learn from older mentors. (read the rest of this shit…)
FEAR CITY is a 1984 crime movie by Abel Ferrara, his followup to 
CHERRY 2000 is a quirky post-apocalyptic adventure, one with a cool sci-fi western premise and alot of underlying oddness and satirical observation about life in the ’80s. The action is slightly stilted, and I think director Steve De Jarnatt (who followed this up with the pre-apocalyptic 
This is another happy delighty type of business, or surprise, like Maniac. Because I hadn’t heard jack shit about this picture being good and it turns out to be something very special. You see it is a crime picture about some junkie thieves who train some young junkie thieves to steal stuff, and the twist is, they are a gang who shoots up and goes on heists.
For the first time in the one (1) year since I got out, I feel like someone has heard me as I shouted to the sky my feelings about the Cinema. Or at least came up with the same ideas seperately. Mr. John Waters is the filmatist in question and this gentleman has created one of the greatest movies EVER about the movies to come out in the last year at least from the ones I have seen. Which is not many but still. This is a must-see picture for Cinema Outlaws like you and me because it takes all of our arguments and wads them all up into a big ball and then molds them into the shape of an entertaining movie.
