Criticature: "Touche pas à la femme blanche" ('Don't Touch the White Woman!' (1974))

If indifference is a disease then one might start analogize the artists of society as the doctors who fight it. And as far as this one loaded yawp is concerned, there’s about as much lasting power as a handful of Walgreens tylenol. 

This Franco-Italian Western set in the heart of 1960s Paris takes an absurdist look at the Battle of Little Bighorn in a way that is about as subtle as a scalping.  As irresistible as all that sounds, it makes for typical bleeding heart boredom.

A Review in Tandem: "Elektra Luxx" (and "Women in Trouble")

I’ll admit that I was a bad critic when it came to this movie. I didn’t approach it with a clean slate. I stumbled in actually wanting to like it. Wanting desperately to capture some semblance of quality or cohesion or subversive wit. But before I take this apology any further I must state that I wasn’t the only one who broke the rules. Director Sebastián Gutiérrez also shattered some cardinal precepts when he made “Elektra Luxx”, a tentatively-rendered sequel to his oddball sex comedy “Women in Trouble”.

Part deux of a proposed trilogy (the upcoming installment appropriately or inappropriately titled “Women in Ecstasy”), “Luxx” has all the same parts that made “Women in Trouble” great (at least in my mind).

For Your Consideration: Movie of the Month

Don't believe in "isms".

Anybody familiar with the work of director Billy Wilder knows right off the cuff that he was a man who understood that nothing, despite of his occasional dramatic proclivities, can be taken too seriously. Not even a war.

You know, that cold one.

And if there was ever a man who could see the bright side of a German POW camp or the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, it was him. Take for instance this month's highlight: the 1961 motor-mouthed comedy of communists, commercialism and Coca-Cola, “One, Two, Three".