“If it weren't for bad people, what would you do for a living, Marshal?”

– Doc Holliday

Monsieur #Hulot – who in his final appearance happens to be an automobile designer – travels to a car show in Amsterdam to demonstrate his latest creation, a camper van par excellence. The vehicle of course accommodates the latest gadgets, such as a collapsible grill.

“Where are you going, Mr. Hulot?”

However regarded as a lesser #Tati, Trafic, is another display of lovingly choreographed insanity, notably a #CarCrash that makes me wonder if this was Tati's attempt to transpose Godard's Week-end (1967) into a pleasant, pre-May 68 France.

Last Chants for a Slow Dance is shocking in its simplicity. Tom (Tom Blair) is out there looking for work. Out of the way of his wife and into the heart of Montana. On a slow moving road trip, as scorching and dragging like hot tar, we accompany him and some of the vapid interactions with others out there. The heat, pursuit of sex, and inter-human exchanges are endless.

 

Things do break.

#Herzog travels to New Holland, Pennsylvania to witness the 1976 World Livestock Auctioneer Championship. Cattle is weighed and paraded in front of the buyers, and the 53 contestants have a few minutes to auction the animals off to the highest bidder.

 

We see glimpses of the audience. New Holland is the land of the money-eschewing #Amish, descendants of German-speaking Swiss, whose dress, ways and speech found an ideal state in an increasingly convoluted world. While money rolls, the Amish hand out their home-baked pies free of charge to the Championship onlookers.

 

To German-as-Apfeltorte Herzog, the auction is bewildering, the “last #poetry possible, the poetry of #capitalism”. In keeping with Herzog's poetic, ecstatic truth, Bruno S. too travels to America and encounters the auctioneers in Stroszek (1977).

Stressed?‽ Who's got time to be stressed when there's a business to be run!!? Tom Palazzolo's Jerry’s Deli is a great character study of not only a character, but a whole time period inhabited by characters. The titular Jerry is Jerry Meyer, owner and proprietor of a Chicagoan deli that happened to be right next to Palazzolo's film lab. You wanna eat? Now, eat! Wanna order? Whaddaya waiting for?? Order!! Roast beef on rye please.

“On RYE!?!”

– Jerry Meyer

Good-for-nothing Willi (Charly Wierzejewski) is in trouble. After yet another run-in with the law, and yet again meeting the wrong people at the wrong time, he falls in love with a destitute street worker (Eva Mattes). Now he really needs #money so he can support himself, her, and her kid. He tries his hand at renting himself out to a rich homosexual (homosexuality was illegal in 1970s W Germany), then moves forward to robbing the money transporter of a local supermarket with his pimp buddy. But as usual, Willi is in trouble.

 

Shot on location in #Hamburg's red-light district St. Pauli, Supermarkt is gritty, unpleasant and has an authenticity rarely seen in other films of this genre.

Kirlian photography claims that plants can communicate telepathically. Rilla (Nancy Snyder) delves deep into the science so to interrogate the only witness to her plant-loving sister Laurie's murder, a ficus.

 

Not to be confused with the inferior alternative cut The Plants are Watching.