Now that's gangsta.
Total format schlock: guy has to make amends for the choices he's made with the help of/while repairing relationships with the ex-girlfriend, Mom, and an old friend. The USA Network's
Burn Unit
twists the shopworn setup by making the guy a former CIA spy whose cover has been blown--"burned," according to the show's setup lingo--and he has to stay put until he figures out who put the burn notice on him. What makes it work is
Touching Evil
's Jeffery Donovan as the outed spy, his ex-girlfriend is Gabrielle Anwar doing a flimsy Irish brogue because she's this kinda/sorta ex-IRA terrorist, the mom is a chain-smoking and pleasantly agoraphobic Sharon Gless from
Cagney and Lacey
, and the old friend is a past his prime Cold Warrior Bruce Campbell, who'll do just about anything for a free drink. Set it all in
CSI
's perpetually sunny, everybody's beautiful world of Miami and then jack up the bonkers elements and it becomes a screwball comedy with con artists, spy games, drug lords, security conferences, FBI informants, and other such fodder of espionage yarns.
editions of Dusan Makavejev's
and
Yes, the late-'60s Leftist bent does feel a bit dated today. Yes, the stories are as fractured and disorienting as Jean-Luc Godard. And, yes, occasionally you are going to come across pictures of Stalin and a gold-plated penis. But the 1960s and '70s movies of Serbian director Dusan Makavejev (the majority of his movies produced and made in the former Yugoslavia) are some of the giddiest and wittiest movies of that heady era of European filmmaking--and the sort of madcap journeys that would have trouble getting made even in today's anything-goes world of digital video and online distribution.
W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism
(1971) is part documentary about Austrian pro-orgasm psychoanalyst Wilhem Reich, part sexual liberation manifesto (starring Slavic beauty Milena Dravìc), part communism satire, and pure unadulterated, anarchic mirth--with daft appearances by Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis and Fug Tuli Kupferberg. (A still from this blithe work adorns the cover of Amos Vogel's indispensable 1974 book
, which was vitally reissued in 2005.) The even more ambitious
Sweet Movie
(1974) skewers capitalism, Marxism, and so-called civilized mores with a riotous, aggressively absurd descent into experiential, scatalogical parable. The winner of the Miss Virginity World beauty pageant (Carole Laure) is awarded marriage to a Texas tycoon, and her flight from that relationship serves as the movie's barely there plot, which lands her in a commune whose members make the key players in Lars von Trier's
look like characters in a Nora Ephron rom-com. Meanwhile, the great Pierre Clementi stars as a sailor named Potemkin who gets picked up by a female skipper (Anna Prucnal) who cruises Amsterdam's canals with sweets in her hull. Neither film wins you over from the very first frame--but chances are you won't see many things like them in this lifetime.
