28 is no age to die, regardless if your name is Susan Superstar or Edie Sedgwick. But it happened, right during the wrap-up of Ciao Manhattan. Edie was gone, just like that, snuffed like so many of the other #Warhol Superstars. What did remain was footage, so much abandoned footage shot in the 60s when those stars were shining at their brightest. That footage, set in glitzy black-and-white Manhattan, is where Edie and Paul America race around town on amphetamine. Or see a doctor to get shots of some sorts.

“Speed is the ultimate, all-time high. That first rush. Wow! Just that burning, searing, soaring sense of perfection.”

– Susan

And there's colour footage too. Susan, topless, semi-(un)consciously dragged around the floor of her empty pool-turned-Superstar-temple. She babbles, drinks, dances around in her panties. And she ODs. Like Edie would even before this movie had seen the light of day.

 

They snuff so fast, these bright Superstars.

It's August 30, #Frankenstein​day.

“If you're not sure a mushroom's good, don't pick it. Because if it's bad, and you eat it, it's your last mushroom and your last everything too.”

Nyatta is not ready to have Jizō take away his big sister Nyāko to Ne-no-kuni, the land of the dead. The kitten grabs his sister's paw, resulting in her soul being ripped in two and leaving Nyāko in a state of limbo. The cats' mother then sends the two off on a mission to buy fried #tofu. Maybe now Nyatta can find a way to put Nyāko's divided soul back together. But first, there's a circus to visit!

 

ねこぢる草 is based on works by mangaka Nekojiru / ねこぢる (1967—1998) whose trademark crudely drawn #cats caused a ripple in Japan's underground #manga circuit. Nyatta and Nyāko continued their surreal adventures by way of widower Yamano Hajime after Nekojiru's tragic suicide in 1998.

“And now for the benefit of the folks who tuned in late, I should like to say that this is the most traumatic spectacle I have ever had the GOOD fortune to witness.”

– TV announcer

Zbigniew Rybczyński's autobiographical Zupa follows an unnamed couple's faltering monotonous relationship.

 

Produced by the groundbreaking Se-ma-for Studios in Łódź – you may be familiar with their 1981 Oscar-winning Tango by, again, Rybczyński – the story is told through colourised analogue still #photography and electronic music and sound effects created by PRES's Eugeniusz Rudnik.

– What do you want?

– We just want that horse of yours.

– You want my horse, there's an awful lot of ya. What are you gonna do with just one horse, anyhow?

– Eat it. We're gonna feed off that beast for at least a week.

Like Rome, Cleopatra wasn't built in a day. Joseph L. Mankiewicz's epic studio breaker took six years to make and, despite it being the highest-grossing film of 1963, didn't break even until 1973. Was it a #flop? A classic flop but a flop nevertheless?

“There are never enough hours in the days of a queen, and her nights have too many.”

– Cleopatra

The star – the Queen – Elizabeth Taylor demanded an unprecedented one million dollar fee, 10,3 million in 2023 US dollars. Liz's movie dressing table hold trinkets especially designed by luxury brand Bulgari, blink and you'll miss them. The Pharaoh's lavish costumes, all 65 of them (created by Irene Sharaff who would dress Taylor again as #Cleopatra's counterpart Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)), cost almost 195K dollar (ca. 2 million today), and of course those 20 000 extras, shipped from God-knows-where to Hollywood on the Tiber to shoot one scene, had to look like their 2000 year old counterparts, and be fed, and housed.

 

Is it all bad? Cleopatra is one of those movies that so many – and that includes obsessive cinephiles – will get around to watch. Eventually. All four hours of it. I'm still holding out, but ooh, the spectacle!

– You know what's really awful?

– No, tell me.

– Getting hooked. It's the end. But, if you only take one shot every once in awhile. Its no different than an occasional drink or cigarette.

Slow cinema of a different kind. We spend long hours in the company of a father (Vasilis Diamantopoulos) and his sons Sakis (George Dialegmenos), Nikos (Dimitris Poulikakos), and Giannis (Nikitas Tsakiroglou). The four of them – rich, bourgeois – have inherited a country villa and the plan is to do nothing for the next seven years. No work, no unnecessary movements. There's #sleep, lots of it. And copious amounts of food prepared by maid Sofia (Olga Karlatos) – she comes with the house; chattels personal – in addition of her body to be consumed by the increasingly idle men.

“Do you want to work? What a nightmarish idea”

Οι Τεμπέληδες της Εύφορης Κοιλάδας is a slow satire, quietly addressing Greek #class struggle through the viewer's observation. Who do we follow? The father, who quickly surrenders to sloth; the sons – young, with their whole lives ahead of them; the maid – never questioning her position and slavishly fulfilling her duties of the flesh, in bed and in the kitchen?

 

The similarities are there but unlike Marco Ferreri's La grande bouffe (1973), there's no culmination in decadence. No euphoria to speak of. No grand release either; while the camera roams the mansion, attuned to #Mahler's tone poem Symphony No. 1 [Titan] – our only clue of the passing of time; even the vegetation succumbs to ennui – the story plods on. One of the men gets dressed, to go to work. It's foolish.