New August Titles: Cult of Personality

Downey does Chaplin

Like scanning virtual tea leaves, sometimes it's fun to look for meaning in a particular batch of new Netflix titles. The month of August might easily be called Biography Month given how many titles focus on the life of a singular personage. From documentaries like Hawking (2013), Chasing Shackleton (2014), and Pumping Iron (1977) to fictionalized accounts like Chaplin (1992), Evita (1996), and Prefontaine (1997)--or even movies named after their main characters, such as Sabrina (1954), Rocky (1976), Mad Max (1979), and Richard Linklater's The Newton Boys (1998)--it's tough not to ponder the existence of a guiding hand in the form of some mischievous Netflix programmer or puckish artificial intelligence. (The more conspiracy-minded among you can imagine the Biography Channel staging a behind-the-scenes coup, or at least greasing back-room palms for a bit of devious cross-marketing.)

May Expiration Watch: Breaking It Down (2014)

An interesting mix of titles are expiring this month, which I'll group loosely into three categories:

Not Charlie's Angels

1. GOING TO EXTREMES

In the mood to have your mind bent, broiled, or otherwise contorted into a WTF curlicue? Any one of these films will leave you variously scratching your head, choking on your popcorn, or considering life in a monastery.

Bad Lieutenant (1992)

Abel Ferrara directs Harvey Keitel in this intense tale of a New York cop battling his inner demons in the original Sin City (i.e., NYC in the early '90s).

Deadly Blessing (1981)

Gorgeous 1970s actress Maren Jensen (Athena in the original Battlestar Galactica) in one of only two movies she starred in before leaving showbiz. This one, a creepy horrorfest directed by Wes Craven, co-stars a young Sharon Stone and an old Ernest Borgnine sporting a Quaker beard. (For trivia buffs, Jensen's other starring role was in the even more obscure Beyond the Reef., a.k.a. Sharkboy of Bora Bora.)

The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

Kinky horror madness from the king of extreme himself, director Ken Russell (Tommy, Altered States, Women in Love). Featuring the unlikely cast of Amanda Donohue, Hugh Grant, and (Holy '80s, Batman!) Catherine Oxenberg.

Over the Top: DHOOM 2

Bollywood movies are an acquired taste. You don't go into them expecting realism and subtlety. Having seen only half a dozen or so, I'm hardly an expert, but one thing I've learned is to toss out my assumptions about what a movie should be the moment I start watching. Designed to appeal to the broadest possible demographic (kids, parents, grandparents, uncles, the family goldfish), they follow the maxim of "more is more." Or in the case of a big-budget action-comedy-musical-romance like Dhoom 2 (2006), "more is lots more." Got a kitchen sink? Go ahead, toss that in, too--maybe someone will need to wash up.

Car Wreck Cinema: THE APPLE

There are guilty pleasures. There are movies so bad they're good. And there are those that, like a five-vehicle pileup on the interstate, you can't take your eyes off of. Welcome to Car Wreck Cinema.

Watching The Apple, a 1980 sci-fi disco opera, I couldn't help thinking of that brief period in the 1970s when porn films actually had a sliver of ambition. Some were entertaining enough that you wondered just how good they might be if the sex had been dropped entirely.

The Apple is the best porno musical ever made, without the porn. It's a movie that gives Can't Stop the Music a run for its money as Gayest Musical Ever--without having any Village People--and makes even Xanadu look like a pretty good idea. For the movie's writer-director, Menahem Golan, you wonder if it was the most elaborate tax dodge in history or, possibly more depressing, the realization of his life's dream.

This.

Written as a Hebrew stage musical in 1977, it so impressed Golan, the co-head of Cannon Studios (purveyor in the 1980s of all things crap), he had it translated into English with the goal of producing the next Grease or Rocky Horror Picture Show. If only he'd aimed lower. Instead of making the best gay porn musical in movie history, he concocted something more resembling the cracked fever dream of a small-town Lady Gaga impersonator.

Set in the glitzy, square-shouldered future of 1994, The Apple spins an Adam and Eve allegory about two naive young folkies from Moose Jaw, Canada, who in their pursuit of pop fame must struggle to save their souls from BIM, a world-dominating music corporation run by a Mr. Boogalow (who's really, you know, Satan). The future, we're shown, will include lots of triangular drinking glasses, star filters, face paint, and baggy silver tunics in a proto Duran Duran style, not to mention young men with pants so tight they actually sport cameltoes. (A gay friend informs me the technical term is "bull's knuckle.")