Email Author Gary Morris

1999 Stories by Gary Morris

• Meet Me in St. Judy

  published December 15, 1999

  Every party needs a hostess, and local impresario Marc Huestis happily cops to the title. "Hostess" Huestis is famous for his camp-drag movie... More >>

• Dial N for Noir

  published December 1, 1999

  Much of film noir's enduring appeal can be traced to its anonymity. There's something seductive about the idea of little-known postwar pulp... More >>

• Export AA

  published November 17, 1999

  Michigan can add to its list of essential exports the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the nation's oldest experimental film fest. Started in 1963,... More >>

• Indelible Marks

  published November 3, 1999

  What a difference a decade makes! Ex-English professor and Freddy Krueger creator Wes Craven's first film, Last House on the Left (1972), is an... More >>

• Trick or Tranny

  published October 27, 1999

  Trannies come in a vast variety -- females to males, males to females, "sissy butches," etc. -- and they're all be visible during Tranny Week,... More >>

• Fright Night

  published October 13, 1999

  What with Y2K, runaway rents, Waco, Rudy Giuliani as art critic, and a thousand other scary forces, fear and trembling -- once the exclusive... More >>

• Breaking the Law

  published September 29, 1999

  Starting in the late '50s, Japanese leisure-class audiences recovering from postwar devastation wanted fresh images and new genres, and filmmakers... More >>

• Groovy Marcia!

  published September 15, 1999

  Two of the more rarefied musical realms, the lounge and the garage, are on gaudy display in a three-part series at Yerba Buena, "The Secret... More >>

• Problem Child

  published July 14, 1999

  The movies' present-day fascination with kid killers, midget murderers, even lethal leprechauns can perhaps be traced to a single entity ("girl"... More >>

• Silence Is Golden

  published July 7, 1999

  "Feature bloat" -- the unfortunate addition of space-hogging features to computer programs -- has a counterpart in local film festivals, which... More >>

• Range Rovers

  published July 7, 1999

  Westerns lack the cultural cachet of film noir or even racy pre-Code movies, but the genre has shown surprising resiliency under the multiple... More >>

• Sleazy Does It

  published June 23, 1999

  The Disneyfication of Times Square has meant more than just the replacement of homeless hookers and dazed crackheads with Mickey Mouse and MTV.... More >>

• Zoom Lens

  published June 16, 1999

  Ask, Tell: The 1999 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Homogenization is supposed to be for milk, not movies, but... More >>

• Mega Watts

  published June 16, 1999

  If the sight of a pre-South Park Isaac Hayes in a chain-mail vest singing "God Is on Our Side" isn't enticement enough to see Wattstax, how about... More >>

• This Is Your Brain on PSAs

  published May 26, 1999

  At some point when no one was looking -- though it was probably in the hazy '70s -- attention deficit disorder went from clinical condition to... More >>

• Bleak House

  published May 12, 1999

  Every "economic miracle" seems to generate a countering critique. Postwar Japan's sprawling suburbanization, unchecked materialism, and fetish for... More >>

• Zoom Lens

  published May 5, 1999

  Bad Girls Jaded cineastes who've seen every Herschel Gordon Lewis movie and every film noir might well consider feeding their fetish for... More >>

• The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

  published May 5, 1999

  For spacey jazzman and word magician Sun Ra, the official idea of "history" (which he denigrated as "his story") was always less interesting than... More >>

• Jad Fair Drives Women Wild

  published May 5, 1999

  Edith Massey said it, in her ditty "Punks Get Off the Grass!": "Sincerity counts when you're talking to me." And who can argue with Edith Massey?... More >>

• And Now, On With the Show: SFIFF Week 2

  published April 28, 1999

  American Cuisine (France, 1998) In this gentle farce in which sexual love is a poor cousin to the passion aroused by good food, U.S. Navy... More >>

• The Persistence of Experimentalism

  published April 21, 1999

  The choice of Johan van der Keuken to receive this year's Persistence of Vision Award is a welcome one, but also an unfortunate reminder of how... More >>

• High Art, With Lowbrow Appeal

  published March 31, 1999

  Celebrated experimental filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh is an anomaly even by the strict standards of the avant-garde, and "Peggy's Playhouse: A Peggy... More >>

• Factory Footage Captures Pop Life

  published March 31, 1999

  "Resurrection" doesn't quite capture it; excavation might be a more appropriate word. Cinematheque's "Pop Resurrection: A Warhol Weekend" consists... More >>

• Zoom Lens

  published March 24, 1999

  Train 86, Where Are You? Pop culture's given us glory trains, cocaine trains, trains to nowhere, and hell-bound trains, but Argentine... More >>

• Film Fights Back

  published March 10, 1999

  Radical voices are hard to hear in an era in which leftists drive SUVs, and NAFTA-pushing, welfare-smashing, Iraq-bombing Bill Clinton is called a... More >>