First on this tape, from Channel 4, Delicatessen. It’s a French film, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (who got the directing gig for Alien Resurrection based mostly on the success of this film) and Marc Caro.
It’s a comedy, but being French, that doesn’t necessarily mean much. It is, however, visually interesting, even if the extreme brown colour grading gets a bit wearing. But there are plenty of moments of beauty (or at least surreality) as when the film’s hero does some bubble magic for the children in the apartment block.
The film is set in some kind of dystopian world. Food is hard to come by, so the butcher, who also owns the apartment block, exerts a lot of power.
I get the feeling this film owes a large debt to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. There’s some kind of revolutionary force hiding underground who remind me a lot of Robert DeNiro’s Harry Tuttle.
I don’t think this film is really for me. There’s only so much dark whimsy I can take, unless I really love the characters, and nobody really popped for me here.
And it’s just a bit too brown for me.
After this, a rather different film, Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle, one of those films that’s almost more famous for how it wa financed than what’s in it. Townsend basically financed the whole film by maxing out a string of credit cards.
Townsend plays an actor, who only gets to audition for stereotyped black roles.
The film has a lot of vignettes looking at the problems of black actors. Here he imagines a Black Acting School, complete with white instructors.
Attack of the Street Pimps
“They want an Eddie Murphy Type”
Co-writer Keenan Ivory Wayans plays Townsend’s co-worker at Winky Dinky Dog.
After he walks off his first starring role because the film is appallingly stereotyped, he dreams about the kinds of roles he could do if the business weren’t so stereotyped, including a superhero role. He’d achieve that goal in his later movie, The Meteor Man, although like this movie, he had to write and direct it himself to get the role.
After this movie, recording continues, with Private View at the Tate Gallery – The Turner Prize 1994. Three critics look at entrants in the Turner Prize, and talk a lot.
This is followed by the start of a film, La Gente de la Universal. The tape ends shortly into this film.
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