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	<title>24XPS</title>
	<link>http://www.24xps.com</link>
	<description>Steve Dollar's topology of cinematic enthusiasms</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Sat, 09 Apr 2011 14:40:38 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>The Mighty Monarch Has Flown:     David F. Friedman, 1923-2011</title>
		<description><![CDATA[It was almost exactly 20 years ago that I drove to Anniston, Alabama, to spend a day with Dave Friedman. The following profile, written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was pegged to the release of Dave&#8217;s autobiographical A Youth in Babylon. I had a hell of a good time hanging out with &#8220;The Kingly Quack of the Iridescent Dream,&#8221; and this archival post is offered as a tribute. Dave died Monday at the age of 87. Heaven just got a little sleazier. 
Hoisting a Bloody Mary that faintly radiates Tabasco, a ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2011/02/david-f-friedman-1923-2011/</link>
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		<title>Sitges 43: A Bloody Good Time</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
Let&#8217;s say this: Rebecca De Mornay was the sexiest of many psycho characters afoot at this year&#8217;s Sitges 43, more officially known as the Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantastic de Catalunya. The actress, who takes the lead in Darren Bousman&#8217;s remake ofMother&#8217;s Day (think Saw, retrofitted for Martha Stewart), struck leggy poses in her leopard-print dress during closing night festivities last Saturday, received a coveted Time Machine trophy (“It looks like an electric chair … I&#8217;m so honored!”) and lent some international movie star glam to a festival whose stalwart attractions are typically hidden ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2010/10/sitges-43-a-bloody-good-time/</link>
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		<title>Neurotic Gangsters Keep It All in the Family</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
Down Terrace has been described as “The Sopranos meet Mike Leigh,” which gets some of the vibe, although it has as much to do with, say, British sketch comedy and the workaday pub-crawler gravitas of a Ray Davies lyric. It follows a course of events in the lives of a crime family living in a Brighton council estate in the days following the release of its heir apparent Karl (Robin Hill) from prison. He’s been ratted on, for some sort of crime, and this unforgivable act supplies an ostensible dramatic ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2010/10/neurotic-gangsters-keep-it-all-in-the-family/</link>
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		<title>Amer: Thighs and Whispers (and Gap-Toothed Women)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Perhaps all anyone needs to know about Amer before they see it is a glimpse at the movie’s poster: a creepy hand reaches forward, out of a vertiginous spiral, grasping at the figure of a nude woman. This evocative fantasia doesn’t reveal much, but grabs attention. Sit down to watch the flick, by French-born, Belgium-based filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, and you’re hooked from the opening title sequence. There’s an intriguing bit of acoustic guitar, suddenly overwhelmedby the menacing gurgle of some weird 1960s Italian electronica that turns out ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2010/05/amer-thighs-and-whispers-and-gap-teeth-women/</link>
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		<title>&#8216;Human Centipede&#8217; Akihiro Kitamura Gets a Leg Up</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
Actor Akihiro Kitamura’s face pops up on the Skype screen but barely gets a word out before his chihuahua, Discocherry, tries to bogart our interview. “She goes crazy!” Kitamura says, chatting from his Los Angeles apartment one recent afternoon. Although he set out to be a director when he arrived in the US from Japan 13 years ago, Kitamura seems to have found a niche as an actor. He’s had a few guest spots on reality shows produced by MTV and VH-1, playing the crazy Japanese guy, and scored a ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2010/04/down-on-all-fours-with-human-centipede-akihiro-kitamura/</link>
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		<title>House: Better Than Busby Berkeley on Crack</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Movies are rarely, if ever, as whirringly rich and strange as House. The 1977 fairy-tale-as-fever-dream from Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi was the debut of a guy who was known mostly for his TV commercials, notably a popular series for the men’s cologne Mandom starring American tough guy icon Charles Bronson. Given a shot at making his first feature by a struggling studio that had nothing to lose, Obayashi did what any aspiring auteur would do: He went to his 11-year-old daughter Chigumi for ideas.
What they came up with is a ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2010/03/house-better-than-busby-berkeley-on-crack/</link>
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		<title>Hunger: Deep Shit</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Turner Prize-winning British artist Steve McQueen makes his feature debut with Hunger (Criterion Blu-Ray), a tough, soul-rattling film about brutality and deprivation conceived as a sensory overload. Not a bio-pic in the conventional mode, the drama takes an inside-out view of events leading to the 1981 hunger strike and death of Irish Republic Army activist Bobby Sands, and nine others, in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison. The shit-covered cell walls, the obscenely brutal beatings, even the seemingly mundane act routine of someone washing their hands, boast an acutely amplified resonance, as ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2010/03/hunger-deep-shit/</link>
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		<title>Yorkshire Death Trip: A Conversation with James Marsh</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Last year, he won an Oscar for best documentary, though most viewers only remember its gymnastically adept star—death-defying French wirewalker Phillipe Petit—and not James Marsh, the English director who made Man on Wire. Marsh, 46, can live with the anonymity. The success of the film, which chronicled one man’s impossible dream to walk between the towers of the World Trade Center on a highwire, redeemed his career.
Marsh’s next move wasn’t another documentary, though. It’s In the Year of Lord 1980, the middle segment of the Red Riding Trilogy, a grim ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2010/03/376/</link>
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		<title>The Road + Bad Lieutenant: Going Down the Road Feeling Bad</title>
		<description><![CDATA[If this year’s Academy Awards producers are foolhardy enough, they could score the show’s customary satirical opening musical bit to R.E.M.’s Nineties anthem “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” Celebrating the post-apocalyptic jollies that destructo epics like Terminator Salvation, 2012 and The Book of Eli (due in January from the Hughes Brothers), the ceremony could acknowledge big-screen doom-and-gloom while glancing sideways at the recession and the rapid decline of studios like Miramax and the Weinstein Co.
Of course leave it to the Weinsteins ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2010/03/the-road-bad-lieutenant-going-down-the-road-feeling-bad/</link>
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		<title>Sweetgrass: Baby Lamb Tossing in America</title>
		<description><![CDATA[What’s all this nonsense about the “silence” of the lambs? The sheep who populate nearly every frame of Sweetgrass are bleat merchants of a spectacularly boisterous order. They may seem gentle and easily persuaded, as they cluster in a vast, moving carpet of snowy wool, kept in regimented order by attentive sheep dogs. But these hooved beasts are louder than bombs. That incessant bahhhh, in all its variations, makes a hypnotic soundtrack for this absorbed and absorbing documentary about the end of an era: The camera follows Montana rancher Lawrence ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2010/03/sweetgrass-baby-lamb-tossing-in-america/</link>
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