BEFORE SCROLLING TO THE WEB PAGE BELOW ABOUT TINTO BRASS, PLEASE TAKE A LOOK AT THESE NEWS ITEMS, WHICH ARE FAR MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING I’VE EVER HAD TO SAY:

AMY GOODMAN: A little-noticed story surfaced a couple of weeks ago in the Army Times newspaper about the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team. “Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months,” reported Army Times staff writer Gina Cavallaro, “the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.” Disturbingly, she writes that “they may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control” as well. The force will be called the chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive Consequence Management Response Force. Its acronym, CCMRF, is pronounced “sea-smurf.” These “sea-smurfs,” Cavallaro reports, have “spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle,” in a combat zone, and now will spend their 20-month “dwell time” — time troops are required to spend to “reset and regenerate after a deployment” — armed and ready to hit the U.S. streets....

FOR THE FULL STORY, CLICK HERE.

It gets worse:

NAOMI WOLF: On October 1, 2008, President Bush deployed a brigade — which means three to four thousand warriors — somewhere in America. We do not know where they are deployed though citizens have informally reported to me having seen military vehicles and troops in Georgia and Alabama. We do know that their official mandate according to the first report is “crowd control” as well as action in the event of a mass civilian catastrophe. Initial reports described their technology “module package” as involving Tasers and rubber bullets.... The First Brigade is Bush’s force: they are not answerable to Congress or to the Governors of states: they are answerable to the Commander in Chief. In an Alternet posting, I interviewed Air Force Colonel (retired) David Antoon who noted that the troops must obey the president, even if he asks them to arrest Congress or fire on civilians or attack media outlets. If they do not obey orders, he notes, they face five years in prison.... Antoon himself calls the deployment “ominous.” Troops on our streets makes us something less than a democracy: one definition of a police state is when a leader sends his own military units into civilian streets. Meanwhile the civilian policing of citizens is becoming more brutal. Hundreds of preemptive arrests took place in St Paul, dozens of journalists were arrested.... In St. Paul, funds were sent in advance to pay off the lawsuits against police forces that were guaranteed to arise from the planned abuse of citizens. This sort of thing is happening across the country. The tactic has established a closed circle that has turned citizens’ law enforcement agencies into contractors of a state that is directing acts of increasing severity against US citizens. Now a military brigade is being deployed....

FOR THE FULL STORY, CLICK HERE.

Click here to see an interview with Naomi Wolf conducted in early October 2008.

For the past five years or so I hve been hearing rumors that Halliburton has been building (and has now finished building) 800 prisons throughout the USA, not yet functioning, but just waiting for the right crisis. I have not found reliable evidence for the specific quantity, readiness, functionality, locations, or details, but you might be interested in taking a look at page 5 of this Halliburton press release dated 26 January 2006: KBR has been awarded a contract announced by the Department of Homeland Security’s United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component. The Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contingency contract is to support ICE facilities and has a maximum total value of $385 million over a five-year term. The contract provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States, or to support the rapid development of new programs.... Now, really, what are the chances of “an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States”? And what are the “new programs” that could come under “rapid development”?

FOR THE FULL PRESS RELEASE, CLICK HERE.

NOW, BACK TO THE MAIN PART OF THE WEB PAGE:

Did you happen to record Monty Python’s Flying Circus when it was shown on PBS back in the 1970s?
Do you still have the tapes?
Is there a TIME-LIFE logo at the end?
If so, please write to me. Thank you!

THE WORKS OF TINTO BRASS

Erotic and Commercial Experiments—Continued

Snack Bar Budapest

(1988)

Poster designed by Guazzi

“This is by Tinto Brass?” That was my silent question from the film’s first frame. Brass’s films are warm and personal. Snack Bar Budapest is ice-cold and impersonal. This seems to have been a commercial venture designed only to make money.

IMAGINARY DIALOGUE

PRODUCER: We just bought the rights to this hot new novel. Could you put L’uomo che guarda on hold and do a commercial thriller instead?

TINTO BRASS: Maybe.

PRODUCER: We want lots of suspense, lots of gunfights, lots of blood, lots of sex. We want a seedy atmosphere, electronic rock music. We want a big hit, a blockbuster. Can you do it?

TINTO BRASS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If that’s what you want, I can do it. Give me a deadline.

And he did it! Scored with moody electronic jazz/rock music by Zucchero, filled with dark rooms lit by blue neon, and consisting only of heartless characters, this is simply not what one would expect to pour forth from Brass’s editing suite. The story has a disbarred Lawyer, recently released from the slammer and now involved with organized crime, taking Milena, who is both his girlfriend and his partner Sapo’s girlfriend, to a hospital in Ostia for an overnight abortion. He checks into a pension called the Snack Bar Budapest where Sapo instructs him by phone to make contact with the up-and-coming local kingpin, a 19-year-old punk-pimp-gangster named Molecola (Italian for “molecule”), who is a Buffalo-trained politician trying to run out the mom-and-pop shops and turn the town into a giant casino-entertainment complex, with the Snack Bar as the centerpiece. The Lawyer (he has no other name) accepts the job of ridding the town of the Snack Bar’s owners, a father, mother, and teenage daughter he had once represented in court. Objecting to the torture inflicted upon mommy by Pappera, one of Molecola’s thugs, the Lawyer bludgeons him to death. In revenge, Molecola and his hookers turn on the pension with rapid-fire pistols. Though the Lawyer and Sapo win out against the poor aim of the hopelessly untrained gunners, they are too late to rescue Milena, who had been strangled to death just after her abortion, apparently by Molecola’s gang.

Snack Bar Budapest uses a formula that almost always works. It consists of two parts: if you (1) go to pains to establish that your story is believable, you can then (2) add the most preposterous ingredients and your audience will still buy it. And here, after an hour and a half, we just accept that a bunch of coked-up hookers, still dressed in their skimpy come-on outfits, are happy to send streams of badly aimed bullets into a hotel. It works! The same holds true with the news media. Journalists—of all political persuasions—follow this formula every day to make us believe whatever their big bosses want us to believe. And it works!

I doubt the film earned a profit, but I’m not sure. This could easily have been the sort of sleaze that the Hollywood studios vomit forth all the time. It is with embarrassment that I admit I used to work in cinemas, and for years and years I had to deal with the ugly crime pics that kept being shoved at me. Despite their poor earning power, it is still dogma that they are staples of the box office’s diet. I can’t even remember most of the crap that I saw or that I had to force-feed our audiences. But here, with a distinguished professor given a kindergarten assignment, we have a film that looks far more smooth and slick than anything we get from our studio hacks, and it puts to shame the garbage that plagues our movie screens. In a sense, it’s exquisite. Brass was hired to make a thriller, and boy did he make a thriller. But it’s not exactly a feel-good movie, if you get my drift. Unlike most of Brass’s films, the focus is on the men, but unlike Yankee, this is hardly a celebration of machismo. Anyway, like some other Brass movies that disappointed me at first, I found myself becoming addicted over the following few weeks. There’s something about his movies that just grows on you (or at least on me).

MOMENTS WORTH WATCHING FOR: Tinto Brass plays the confused judge (with a Hitler mustache), and his wife Tinta is also behind the bench. In another scene, Osiride Pevarello plays a monk who visits the ballroom at Molecola’s brothel and has a great time dancing with the girls. The unexpected appearances of Osiride Pevarello constitute my favorite running gag in Brass’s films. When Molecola takes his thugs to attack a local cinema, the Cine Tabù, he says that he hopes the Lawyer enjoys “porn” films. And what is this “porn” film playing there? Why, The Key, of course! You can’t miss the close-up of the motor scooter’s license plate: TB 8 1567. I wonder what those first two letters stand for. And then Molecola’s license plate is TB 51 2254. Hey.

TWO GREAT ACTORS YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF BEFORE AND WILL PROBABLY NEVER HEAR OF AGAIN: François Négret is perfect as the overly demonstrative crime boss. He’s supposed to be 19, but he looks more like 15 or 16. You won’t forget him. And Valentine Demì, who bears an undeniable and probably deliberate resemblance to Tim Curry’s Frank-n-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, has a powerful stage presence as well as an innate comic gift. According to Cybercore, though, apart from this movie she seems to have done little other than porn—soft and hard. Too bad. With a good rôle, she’d command any audience’s full attention. She’s a dynamo. She turns up again in Paprika (as Valentine Demy), but, strangely, without so much as a hint of that magnificent stage presence.


The phenomenal François Négret

The phenomenal Valentine Demì

ROBERTO LERICI. This was the final collaboration between Tinto Brass and playwright Roberto Lerici, who would die just a few years later. In the future, without Giancarlo Fusco or Roberto Lerici on hand, Brass began to repeat himself. Now, that’s not a bad thing, not at all. But it does seem to indicate that Brass really missed his fellow brainstormers.

TECHNICAL NOTES: The VHS edition was electronically matted at about 1.85:1, which is too small but doesn’t look bad at all. The print used in the transfer was a circulating theatrical print, with grease-pencil cue marks every 15 minutes or so. While the film has no heart, it has technical ultraprecision. And that makes me wonder why there are two mistaken camera moves during the opening credits, which was probably the easiest and least expensive shot in the film. Why didn’t the crew take 15 minutes to re-shoot it? Odd. The rest of the film is technically flawless.

Tinta Brass

QUESTIONS: The voice that comes out of Philippe Léotard’s mouth is the same as the voice that came out of Alberto Lupo’s mouth in Action. And it looks as though François Négret delivered his lines in French. So who dubbed the voices? And can anyone help us identify the actors?

Italian DVD, allegedly wrongly cropped at 1.85:1. No idea about language options. PAL, which will not play on most US equipment.

The British Region-2 PAL DVD, which will not play on most US equipment. Correctly transferred at 1.66:1. Optional English subtitles. No extras. Note the plagiarized summary on the web site, which I have told the folks at Arrow about several times, to no avail. (I really don’t usually mind when people plagiarize me, if they only take a few sentences or paragraphs here and there. But when they don’t understand my jokes, I get upset.)

It looks like NoShame Films will release this on DVD in the US sooner or later.

STUFF ABOUT THE AUTHORS OF THE POPULAR 1987 NOVEL:
Clarence—Autori A–L: Lodoli
Ipse dixit: Marco Lodoli
Biblioteca Universitaria Alessandrina Sala Mostre: 9 November, Marco Lodoli
And the always-expected dead link:
http://www22.mondadori.com/panorama/numeri/pan2997/2997_cassetta.html

STUFF ABOUT THE MUSIC:
Blue: Unofficial Site of Zucchero Sugar Fornaciari
MusicalStore.it: Zucchero
And the dead links:
http://www.directmedia.ch/d/music/zucchero.cfm
http://www22.mondadori.com/panorama/numeri/pan2997/2997_cassetta.html
http://www.bluesoul.it/eng/duet.htm

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH:
Miss Italia Pageant 1983: Raffaella Baracchi

Giovanni Bertolucci, Galliano Juso e Reteitalia presentano
un film di Tinto Brass