Holy Mountain

[rich]

saw this in NYC years ago
amusing to a degree

this movie was definitely one of the weirdest things I've seen:

The title of Scott King's *Treasure Island* doesn't refer to Robert Louis
Stevenson's pirate adventure but the San Francisco military base that was
home to code breakers and cryptographers in World War II. The 1999 Sundance
Jury Prize-winning film begins with the look and rich black and white
texture of 1940s cinema, right down to the phony newsreel and mock spy
serial that precedes the film proper, but soon spins off into a bizarre,
shadowy psychosexual drama. King was initially inspired by the nonfiction
book *The Man Who Never Was*, the account of an ingenious decoy planted by
British intelligence to mislead the Germans about the upcoming invasion of
Sicily (which was the basis of a 1956 film with Clifton Webb), but in the
film he's interested less in the espionage than the hidden private lives and
repressed emotions of the film's cryptographer heroes. As they construct an
elaborate back story for a corpse the military plans to dump in Japanese
waters with phony invasion documents, their fears, frustrations, and
obsessions rise to the surface. While it's not completely successful, King's
audacious approach and unsettling scenes offer a genuinely offbeat and at
times surreal look at the sexually repressed 1940s. It's a frank view of
human sexuality with nudity, homoerotic content, and often off-putting
sexual activity.

The handsome DVD by All Day Entertainment is cleverly packaged in a
hardcover booklet in a slipcase. The supplements include two separate
commentary tracks by King (one on the making of and one on the meaning of
the film), short documentary featurettes on the making of the film and its
Sundance premiere, a complete set of storyboards (with immediate access to
the scene), and deleted and extended scenes with introductions by the
director. *--Sean Axmaker*



On 4/6/06, Ghetta Life <ghetta_outta at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> My stepson just sent me the DVD of a movie I'd never heard of:  The
> American
> Astronaut.  He swears it'll be one of my all-time favorite movies.  I'll
> probably watch it this weekend.
>
> http://www.americanastronaut.com/home.shtml
>
> Ghetta
>
> >From: jd <wescac at gmail.com>
> >
> >Speaking of eccentric movies:
> >
> >http://www.greylodge.org/gpc/?p=383
> >
> >I got it... it looks like a VHS movie from 1975 or something,
> >definitely not the high-quality you would get in theatres... but since
> >Barney refuses to release it and it's only been to Boston once in the
> >five years I've been here as far as I am aware I figure I'll take what
> >I can get.
> >
> >An artist certainly has a right to choose how to display his art... in
> >this case Barney wants people to sit through the whole thing straight,
> >no breaks (which is defeated by intermissions between each film / in
> >the middle of 3 / people talking in the theatre / etc) but damnit I
> >wish he'd just release a DVD.
> >
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> On the road to retirement? Check out MSN Life Events for advice on how to
> get there! http://lifeevents.msn.com/category.aspx?cid=Retirement
>
>
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