Holy Mountain

[Paul Mackin]

On Apr 6, 2006, at 12:32 PM, rich wrote:

> 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.

Any nod in the film to the movie "Charlie Chan at Treasure Island?"   
Murder mystery set at the 1939-40 Golden Gate Exposition for which  
Treasure Island was constructed.

Involved a fake medium called Dr.Zodiac.

The island was built from the debris accumulated  from  tunneling  
through Goat  Island for the Bay Bridge.


> 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.
> >
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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>

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