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BLAZE - Still 1
Blaze
Johnny Thunders - Madrid Memory
Johnny Thunders wasn’t much of a role model but the onetime New York Dolls’ guitarist had an intuitive sense of the rawest essence of rock ’n’ roll. Madrid Memory caught him on a decent night on tour in Spain, 1984. Backed by a solid garage outfit, Thunders was nimble and animated as he tore through rock staples (“Pipeline”) along with a gaggle of numbers associated with his own career (“Personality Crisis,” “Born to Lose”).
Blaze
Blaze (2018) is about a singer/songwriter few people know anything about. Not a conventional music biography but an imaginative recreation, Ethan Hawke’s film concerns Blaze Foley (Ben Dickey), a charming, loving, talented drunk who wrote ruminative songs in a back-porch country style. As Townes Van Zandt, his better-known pal, explains: “He only went crazy once, but he stayed there.” Charlie Sexton directs the music and Sam Rockwell, Alia Shawkat and Richard Linklater co-star.
Mélo
French director Alain Resnais is best remembered for Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Years later, with Mélo (1986), he made a movie that seldom moves. Adapting it from a 1920s stage play about a doomed romantic triangle, Resnais delights in all staginess. The stars in the sky are obviously painted on the ceiling, and the story slips across a handful of beautifully appointed sets whose edits serve as punctuation for an extended conversation between cast members.
“Fantomas: Three Film Collection”
Fantomas was one of the first supervillains. The pre-World War I French pulp-fiction (and silent movie) character was revived in the 1960s—hot on the heels of 007—for a series of movies by France’s swashbuckler-thriller director André Hunebelle. Played strictly for laughs, the three films collected on this two-disc Blu-ray are spoofs of ’60s intrigue-adventure flicks as bungling cops and reporters-turned-crime fighters chase across land, sea and air in pursuit of an indomitable mastermind.
