lghill24 Reviews

Primo Baby (1990)

Makes National Velvet Look Like A Michel Haneke Film

[1/10 · 9 November 2006]

I saw this clunky girl-meets-horse film at a gala premiere years ago. It was a bit like that scene in The Producers where the audience looks at the stage in mute horror. Alas, unlike The Producers, one couldn't view Primo Baby with camp detachment and extract a few belly laughs. Beyond the kind of dreary paint-by-numbers dialogue found in similar films aimed at an elusive Disney fanbase, I can only recall a grim chase scene around one of Calgary's LRT stations. And when I mean "grim", I don't mean in a William Friedkin/French Connection sort of way, but "grim" in a kind of...who the hell blocked and lit such a clumsy scene?

I am not a natural fan of "something the whole family can enjoy" flicks, but one can make something like The Black Stallion, The Yearling or The Railway Children, which can rise above the saccaharine tone of the genre and become something quite memorable. Sadly the filmmakers in Primo Baby stuck to the basic clichés of something like National Velvet (while completely failing to replicate the style of that film) without bringing anything novel to their reinterpretation. The cinematography is unmemorable and the acting is unconvincing beyond a certain barebones professionalism.

End of the Road (1970)

A neglected masterpiece of late sixties cinema

[14 September 2004]

I would like to refute many of the negative comments about this film. It is the closest, I believe, that an American film of the period came to emulating the look and sound of late 60s' Godard or Bergman's Persona. End of the Road would be be a perfect companion to a series of films that might include Performance, the aforementioned Bergman, Mickey One (which director Avakian edited), or William Friedkin's adaptation of The Birthday Party. I am a big fan of Barth's novel, but I feel this radical adaptation extends the original in a way that is equally groundbreaking. The novel was more about the fifties, while the film is shaped by the explosive events of 1968 - Tet, the Kennedy and King assassinations, student riots, the rise of Nixon/Agnew - which take the whole idea of the novel's "politics of the personal" to another level. A DVD restoration of this misunderstood landmark is well overdue.