Temistocles Lopez Movies

Temistocles Lopez's Chain of Desire, based on Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde, plays like an AIDS-era version of The Yellow Rolls Royce, in which a series of unrelated amorous lovers are connected by a "chain of desire." The film begins as Alma D'Angeli (Linda Fiorentino) flees from a lover and runs into a church, where she finds solace and a young Latino worker, Jesus (Elias Koteas). They make love. Then Jesus comes home to his wife Isa (Angel Aviles) and gets intimate with her. The next morning, Isa goes off to see Dr. Jerald Buckley (Patrick Bauchau), with whom she is having an affair. After seeing Isa, Jerald heads off to visit Linda (Grace Zabriskie), a sexy dominatrix. Linda returns home to her husband, Hubert (Malcolm MacDowell), a harried television commentator. After an unsatisfactory interview with women who claim to have had affairs with John F. Kennedy, he relieves his tensions by seeking the arms of Keith (Jamie Harrold), a teenage hustler. And the trail continues on as gay social worker Ken (Tim Guinee) offers Ken a place for the night, followed by Ken's lover David Bango (Dewey Martin) and hot dancer Diana (Holly Marie Combs), who wants David to deflower her. Coming on the scene after that is famed artist Mel (Seymour Cassel), who has a tryst with Diana, but he finds that he has to answer to his vindictive wife, Cleo (Assumpta Serna). At the end, all the characters arrive at a hip nightclub, where Alma, the singer at the club, has learned that the lover she had spurned at the beginning of the film has been diagnosed with AIDS. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

Anyone even vaguely familiar with the endless antics of the deliberately eccentric Catalonian artist Salvador Dali (1904-1989) may find this biographical tidbit fascinating. By 1940, still in his thirties, this strikingly handsome (though slightly pop-eyed) artist had made waves around the world among those who followed the avant garde. His best-known painting, The Persistence of Memory, was already synonymous with surrealism. However, it is his mad-seeming publicity-hound antics that polished his already notorious reputation to a high gloss. In this movie, Dali (Lorenzo Quinn) has just arrived in New York harbor wearing fried eggs on the lapels of his elegant suit, with a loaf of bread on his head. This is appropriate attire for a surrealist who explores the power of putting objects in places where they do not "belong." He is immediately taken in hand by a reporter from the New York Times, and is encouraged to tell the reporter the story of his life, which shows up in flashbacks. Among those whose lives he has sparkled in is the famously homosexual Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who fell in love with the artist when he was a gorgeous young man; the more sexually conventional filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who created some of his more famous and outrageous classics (e.g. Un Chien Andalou) while he associated with the artist; and his fellow artist Pablo Picasso, who surely took a leaf or two from this brash man in the self-promotion department. Though filmed in English, the film was released in a dubbed Catalan version. Though he frequently appeared to be quite mad, Dali's picturesque madness was entirely deliberate -- and very, very profitable. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

In this film, Venezuelan director Diego Risquéz has focused on the life of South America's famed libertador, Simón Bolívar. He explores the episodes in Bolívar's life and tragic death by using images alone (no dialogue), a technique that makes his subject matter quite abstruse. Only viewers already familiar with the legend of the man and the early history of Venezuela will recognize many of the symbols and the storyline. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi