Greedy men go to despicable lengths to best each other over a few coins.
Tag Archives: Experimental
SATURDAY SHORT: SOCIALIST CIRCLE (2015)
Socialist Circle (2015) is essentially three and-a-half minutes of too much going on, or for our purposes, just enough going on.
Content Warning: This short contains brief cartoon nudity and adult themes.
SATURDAY SHORT: BRIGHT FUTURE MY LOVE (2014)
A man lives an isolated life in a concrete room. Each workday he walks through abandoned infrastructure to his job where he is fed some milky substance through a tube. This is his life, until he crosses paths with a coworker of the opposite sex.
228. LEMONADE JOE (1964)
Limonádový Joe aneb Konská Opera [Lemonade Joe, or the Horse Opera]
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“What was before my eyes was both familiar and eerily strange.”–Danilo H. Figueredo, in Revolvers and Pistolas, Vaqueros and Caballeros: Debunking the Old West, on the experience of seeing Lemonade Joe in Cuba
DIRECTED BY: Oldrich Lipský
FEATURING: Karel Fiala, Olga Schoberová, Rudolf Deyl, Miloš Kopecký, Kveta Fialová
PLOT: A lemonade-drinking cowboy rescues a beautiful temperance worker from rowdies in a tavern. Impressed with his heroism and trick shooting, the town opens an all-lemonade saloon, which upsets the local whiskey barons. With the help of a prostitute Joe has scorned, they scheme to kill the teetotalling hero and make Stetson City safe for intoxicating spirits once more.
BACKGROUND:
- The word “limonádový” actually translates to “soft drink,” not “lemonade,” but there can be no doubt Lemonade Joe has a better ring to it than Soft Drink Joe.
- The Lemonade Joe character began his life in a series of stories by satirist Jiří Brdečka. The stories were then adapted into a 1946 play, a short series of animated shorts, and finally into this hit movie.
- Co-screenwriter/director Oldrich Lipský was the artistic director of Prague’s Satirical Theater. He went on to direct several popular and critically successful films, including Happy End (a 1966 experimental film that plays backwards) and Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians (1981).
- Although the Western had been a popular genre in Czechoslovakia in the early part of the 20th Century, largely due to the writings of German pulp author Karl May, Western films had been banned through the German and Soviet occupations. They only began to be screened again (and then rarely) in the 1960s.
- Czechoslovakia submitted Lemonade Joe to the Academy Awards, but it was not selected for the Best Foreign Language Film competition.
- This movie was a huge hit in its home country—the biggest-drawing film of the 1960s—and remains a cult movie there to this day.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Lemonade Joe and his nemesis—who is outfitted in blackface because he has been posing as Louis Armstrong for a duet with Joe at the piano—square off in a shootout. The gunfire’s path appears onscreen as dotted lines so that we can see that the bullets are striking each other in midair, leading the duel to end in a draw.
THREE WEIRD THINGS: Fiddle eating; Czech blackface; dotted bullets
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Communist propaganda, surreal Czech sensibilities, and an honest appreciation for the entertainment value of early Hollywood films collide to create a homegrown retro-Western musical spoof that could almost have come from the mind of Guy Maddin.
Clip from Lemonade Joe
COMMENTS: You hear the names Milos Forman, Vera Chytilová, Continue reading 228. LEMONADE JOE (1964)
SATURDAY SHORT: PAMON (2014)
Human-like creatures in a florescent world use their shape-shifting hair to hunt, and grope each other’s chest hair to communicate. It has a cuteness to it, but belongs here more than it does in a playlist of kitten videos.