The Screengrab : anthology film archives

The Rep Report (April 8 -- 14)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

NEW YORK: “Pictures from Life’s Many Sides: The Films of Jim McBride”, which runs April 8 through April 13, gives fans of the director Jim McBride, an affable figure who emerged from the '60s underground scene and who has won some attention for his work through the years without ever managing to parlay his successes into a sustained movie career, the chance to catch up with some of his least-seldom screened works. These include his debut, David Holzman's Diary, a prescient look at the dangers of eager aspiring filmmakers winding up with too much filming and not enough life; his hour-long "fictional documentary" My Girlfriend's Wedding (1969); the post-apocalyptic Glen and Randa (1971), featuring Shelley Plimpton and Garry Goodrow; and the 1974 softcore teen comedy Hot Times. There's also one of McBride's weirdest and most audacious flings as a Hollywood operator, the 1983 remake of Godard's Breathless, which, depending on who you ask, is either a garish travesty, the best showcase the young Richard Gere ever had for his self-infatuated strut, or both. The director himself is scheduled to appear Friday, April 10, to participate in a conversation with Jonathan Demme and L. M. Kit Carson, who starred in David Holzman's Diary and wrote Breathless.

For nine days starting April 8, Film Forum offers audiences a rare chance to see Masaki Kobayashi's legendary epic Thu Human Condition (1959-1961), a three-part, almost ten-hour long World War II film much celebrated for its scope and its central performance by Tatsuya Nakadai (whose brave, steady performance is all the more amazing considering that, during the extended filming process, he also appeared in a dozen other movies, including Kon Ichikawa's The Key, Kurosawa's Yojimbo, and Mikio Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. Film Forum is charging separate admissions for each of its long three parts, but if you're looking to save on cab fare, they are showing the whole thing back to back on Saturday, Sunday, and the the close of the engagement on Thursday, April 16.

The 16th Annual New York African Film Festival, running from April 8 through the 14th, includes 15 fifteen films from a continent that remains sorely underrepresented in the regular international distibution chain. The opening selection is Jihan El-Tahri's Behind the Rainbow, which uses the evolution of the relationship between two prominent ANC members, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, to trace the last few decades of South Africa's political history.

The Rep Report (February 27 - March 5)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: It's a great week for wild men in the Big Apple repertory scene. The Italian-born Marco Ferreri was the kind of artist who is unimaginable without the 1960s but who wasn't quite of the '60s: he was the kind of older, shaggy figure who was attracted to exploring ideas of liberation, revolution, self-transformation, and chaos but who was never easily convinced that they led to utopia. An eight-film DVD box set of Ferreri's work was released here last year; with any luck, it might create a new audience for such works as La Grande Bouffe and Tales of Ordinary Madness (starring Ben Gazzara as a stand-in for Charles Bukowski). One film not included in the set is the 1969 Dillinger Is Dead, which, starting today, plays for a week in a new 35 mm. print at BAM. The film stars the pre-eminent French Mr. Smooth of his generation, Michel Piccoli, who comes home one night for a long evening of cooking, gun-polishing, and soul-searching while his missus, played by Keith Richards muse Anita Pallenberg, is zonked out in the bedroom. Dillinger does not come our way often, so this screening is highly recommended.

Actors like Rip Torn don't come dancing down the main drag every day, either, and it's hard to think of another irascible, once-borderline-unemployable thespian crazy who's mellowed into such a surefire entertainer without losing much of his edge, piss, and vinegar. Anthology Film Archives has concocted a mini-Rip Torn festival that begins next Thursday with Maidstone, the legendary Norman Mailer improv party that ends with our hero, dissatisfied with the ending Mailer had settled for, trying to juice things up by attacking his director with a hammer after Mailer thought the shoot had wrapped, and 1973's Payday, arguably the finest full-length showcase of Torn's career, in which he stars as a third-rate country music star barnstorming across the back roads while his fuse gets shorter and shorter and his heart rate gets perilously faster. The retrospective, which runs for a couple of weeks, also includes Alan Rudolph and writer Bud Shrake's joyously entertaining Songwriter, in which Rip demonstrates that he may be the only man alive who can turn Willie Nelson into his straight man; the little-seen 1970 Tropic of Cancer, starring Rip as Henry Miller; Milton Moses Ginsburg's Coming Apart, a virtual one-man show with Rip as a demented psychiatrist filming himself in a mirror; Beyond the Law, another Mailer psychodrama; and the more recent 40 Shades of Blue, starring the grizzled older Torn as a legendary Southern music producer. There's also a special program labeled "A Rip Torn Miscellanea", consisting of "rare footage of Torn, including documentation of some of his renowned stage performances, forgotten talk-show appearances, excerpts from some of his lesser-known film and TV work," including a half-hour TV film from 1976 in which he plays Walt Whitman.

SAN FRANCISCO: At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, "Fearless: Strand Releasing Turns 20" is in full swing and continues through Saturday and continues from March 6 through March 8. This celebration of the risk-taking distributor's films includes a double feature from the neglected French director-actor Jacques Nolot, Before I Forget and Porn Theater.

BERKELEY: "Women’s Cinema from Tangiers to Tehran" at Pacific Film Archives (March 1 - April 29) is a "celebration of women filmmakers from North Africa and the Middle East, as well as the diaspora in Europe" that offers "a remarkable geographic, cultural, and stylistic range. In documentaries, features, and experimental works, the directors depict urban attitudes and rural traditions, the dream of escape and the isolation of exile, and the comforts and entrapments of family." Director-actress Niki Karimi will be present at the opening-day screenings of her One Night and A Few Days Later... The program also includes Iranian director Marziyeh Meshkini's wrenching The Day I Became a Woman and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's animated memoir Persepolis.

COLUMBIA, MISSOURI: The True/False Film Festival, which kicked off last night and runs through the weekend, is an international documentary festival with a fast-growing reputation based on the breadth and quality of its selections, which last year included this year's Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature, Man on Wire. indieWIRE has an interview with festival founders David Wilson and Paul Sturtz.

The Rep Report (November 14--21)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Film Society of Lincoln Center pays tribute to the late, great Manny Farber with the kind of celebration every film critic (every film nut, for that matter) has probably dreamed of being held in his honor: a couple week's worth of movies that inspired Farber to kick the theater seat in front of him in happy excitement, and to kick out the jams when he sat down to transfer that excitement to his writing about them. Any enthusiast of Farber's will notice something missing that's essential to their own conception of The Manny Farber Experience, but the programmers have certainly done an admirable job of indicating the wide range of Farber's taste, from the grungy crime movies (Howard Hawks's Scarface, Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground) and suggestive scare flicks (the Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur I Walked with a Zombie) and motor-mouthed comedies (His Girl Friday, Preston Sturges's Christmas in July) that Farber pegged as the pride of old Hollywood to such art-house fare as Resnais's Muriel, Godard's Two or Three Things I know About Her, and experimental films by Michael Snow and Jean-Marie Straub. The double bill of the season just might be Don Siegel's The Lineup, a charged thriller based on a forgotten TV series and starring Eli Wallach as a demented hit man, with the classic Chuck Jones cartoon One Froggy Evening. This Sunday, the program also pairs up two short documentaries inspired by Farber's work: Chris Petit's 1999 Negative Space, which includes interviews with both Manny and his soul brother Dave Hickey, and Untitled: New Blue, Paul Schrader's five-minute look at one of Farber's paintings. Schrader will be on hand to introduce the film, and as an associate of Neil Young's once said of another associate of Neil Young's that boy can flat yap.

Film Forum begins a week-long tribute to director Les Blank, a documentarian whose range of subjects--mainly food, filmmaking, music, and wild women--clearly designate him as one of God's better ideas. Included are Blank's classic tribute to Mardi Gras Indians, Always for Pleasure (1978), whose title could also apply very nicely to his career, as could his 1968 God Respects Us When We Work, but Loves Us When We Dance. Other films included cover the life and work of bluesmen Lightinin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb, Louisiana musicians CLifton Chenier and Michael Doucet, and Flaco Jimenez, as well as garlic, polka, Tex-Mex, and Werner Herzog, seen in the double bill Burden of Dreams, which is about the making of Fitzcarraldo, and the short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, which is literally about what it says it's about. To gorge on this stuff is to come to a fresh understanding of just how thoroughly you've misspent most of your own life.

Also dropping in at the Forum for a week: Charlie Ahearn's 1982 Wild Style, in a spanking new 35-mm. print. Starring a celebrated graffiti artist, Lee Quinones, and shot in New York back in the day when the city had graffiti, Wild Style was a mainstay of cable TV's Night Flight in the late 1980s, and it seems to come back about once every ten years. To be honest, I've never been able to remain focused on it for all of its 82 minutes. But its hardcore fans don't worship at its altar because Ahearn was a master filmmaker or any kind of storyteller; they revere the movie, which includes glimpses of Grandmaster Flash, Fab Five Freddy, the Rock Steady Crew, the Cold Crush Brothers, artist Sandra Fabara, and onetime "downtown scene queen" Patti Astor, because it's a living record of a moment just before hip hop broke wide open, and because Ahearn had the taste, or the good luck, to capture that moment in a way that seemed to anticipate what was about to come. It's practically a federal law that any mention of the movie include the phrase "time capsule."

More pieces of time can be found at Anthology Film Archives, where they're kicking off an eight-film retrosepctive to 86-year-old director Arthur Penn, who I once referred to at this site as "the late" Arthur Penn, only to turn on TCM's Brando documentary to see him chattering away, still alive and looking more like Iggy Pop than ever. The AFA will be running his groundbreaking Bonnie & Clyde as well as some of the less heralded earlier films that offer tantalizing hints of the triumphs to come--The Left Handed Gun starring Paul Newman as Billy the Kid and the excellent film version of The Miracle Worker, but also his film maudit and first collaboration with Warren Beatty, the fascinating, unclassifable failure Mickey One (1965)--and the ambitious, sometimes fumbling attempts to follow it up (Alice's Restaurant, Little Big Man, Night Moves.)

BERKELEY: "Discovering Teuvo Tulio" (November 15-December 4) at Pacific Film Archives offers those looking for something different and obscure (in our neck of the woods, anyway) the chance to catch up on "the wild and willful director of Finnish melodramas from the 1930s and 1940s." Tulio was an actor in silent films, earning the designation "Finland's Valentino." According to the PFA, when Tulio turned director, "he poured an erotic passion worthy of Valentino into the act of filmmaking itself. In his early 'haystack dramas,' Tulio paid homage to the spectacular nature cinematography of Scandinavian silents and retold classic coming-of-age stories, embellishing these with outrageous use of orchestral music and editing to rival Eisenstein (he produced and edited all his films of this era). As war approached, his themes and imagery became considerably darker, more urban and expressionistic. The thread that runs through all these films is the sexual frankness that overturns the very conventions Tulio so consciously resurrects. Surely if every woman who innocently engaged in premarital sex went down the road Tulio maps, prostitution would have accounted for half of Finland’s GDP." Not having seen any of the four films in the program, I can't vouch for any of this, but it sure caught my attention. Apparently Aki Kaurismaki is a big fan, and for all I know, Tulio may turn out to be the Douglas Sirk to his Fassbinder. So if you love The Man Without a Past, The Match Factory Girl and La Vie de Boheme--and if you don't, to hell with you, I say--here's your chance to see where their roots may lie.

The Rep Report (September 12--19)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: If you've ever wondered why Robert Downey, Jr. keeps that "junior" in his name, it's because, once upon a time, when Downey was starting out in the mid-1980s, it still seemed prudent to make it easier for casting directors to figure out that he was not his own father, a man who until recently did not have to be advertised as "Robert Downey, Sr." In the 1960s, Downey the Elder made a string of low-budget satirical comedies, notably Babo 73 (1964), which starred underground cinema mainstay Taylor Mead and 1965's Chafed Elbows, arguably the first "underground" to receive a significant measure of commercial and critical success. Though he had an almost-mainstream hit with 1969's Putney Swope, he pretty much dropped off the radar after 1972's Greaser's Palace. (In between, he made the 1970 Pound, which is set in one, and which features Robert Downey the Younger's film debut. He played a puppy.) But while most of his later feature-film work made it to home video in the 1980s--even Up the Academy, the infamous (and disowned) attempt to start a Mad magazine movie franchise to compete with the National Lampoon--those early-'60s films just dropped off the face of the Earth, and were generally assumed to have been lost.. Now Anthology Film Archives is bringing them back for a week's run. Bruce Bennett at New York Sun has the story of how Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation got on board with the project of restoring Downey's early work. It is reported that Downey, upon learning that Martin Scorsese agreed that it was worth putting up the "small fortune" necessary to restore these films because of their cultural significance, had a quick answer: "Has he seen them?"

Film Forum, in association with the BFI, commences a two-week tribute to David Lean on Friday. Yeah, Lawrence of Arabia and the other late epics are made for the big screen, but for some of us, the really choice news here is that many of Lean's finely crafted, early entertainments are brought together, many in handsome new prints. The program kicks off perfectly with the Dickens-adaptation double feature: Great Expectations, a rousing entertainment that famously inaugurated Lean's lifelong partnership with Alec Guinness (seen here in the role of Herbert Pocket), and Oliver Twist, in which Guinness actually caused the movie some problem with Jewish groups for his alarmingly faithful embodiment of Dickens's Fagin. There's also the chance to see Charles Laughton tear it up with a splendidly undomesticated performance in the domestic comedy Hobson's Choice, Noel Coward perfect the stiff upper lip in the wartime propaganda film In Which We Serve, and Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard take out a patent on the masochistic romantic agony of shared self-denial in Brief Encounter. A word to the wise: if it's epic you're after, take a pass on the latest drive to "re-evaluate" Lean's misbegotten 1970 waste of time Ryan's Daughter and, instead, check out his last film, the sumptuous, brilliantly acted 1984 version of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India.

LOS ANGELES: The 12th Annual Latino International Film Festival, one of the pre-eminent opportunities for Latino filmmakers to show their work to audiences in the U.S., runs September 12 through the 19th. The 132-film program ranges from the popular and timely Colombian drama Paraiso Travel to music documentary profiles of Celia Cruz and Israel "Cachao" Lopez.

The Rep Report: September 5--10

Phil Nugent — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives commences its salute to Jerry Schatzberg tonight with screenings of the director's firat features, the 1970 alienation-fest Puzzle of a Downfall Child (starring Faye Dunway) and the 1971 The Panic in Needle Park, costarring Al Pacino, in his first starring role, and Kitty Winn as a young couple of heroin addicts. Schatzberg, who seems to be more or less retired, had an erratic career, and to his other problems, he'll probably have at least one chance during his personal appearance at this retrospective to patiently explain that, no, he isn't Joel Schumacher. But as a filmmaker he had a broad curiosity about different milieus and kinds of characters, and his pictures have generally had texture and weight. Needle Park retains interest as a deep quaff of '70s New York at its most confoundingly ungovernable, and Schatzberg can boast of having directed Pacino in both his last performance before The Godfather made him a star and the first picture he made afterwards, the 1973 road movie Scarecrow co-starring Gene Hackman. When Schatzberg made the New York-set Street Smart fifteen years after Needle Park, he had to shoot it in Toronto, but once again he helped launch the movie career of a major star, this time someone who'd been working for decades and would turn fifty the year the picture was released: just a couple of years earlier, Morgan Freeman had been reduced to holding down a job on Another World, but his terrifying performance as a pimp who emerges like a monster from the id to turn pampered reporter Christopher Reeve's life into a pretzel earned him his first Academy Award nomination and a long-belated measure of the industry stature he'd long deserved. Also showing: Honeysuckle Rose, a 1980 country music remake of Intermezzo starring Willie Nelson and Dyan Cannon, which introduced Willie's theme song "On the Road Again," and "Reunion," a sadly overlooked 1989 film starring Jason Robards, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter.

Raindance, the British company responsible for the Raindance Film Festival (which opens October 7, by the way), is bringing its educational program to the New York Film Academy. Aspiring filmmakers looking to drop a few bucks towards their futures might want to check out Elliot Grove's "99 MInute Film School" on Tuesday, September 9 and the "Lo to No Budget Filmmaking" seminar on the weekend of September 13 and 14, which bears a recommendation blurb from director Christopher Nolan, whose most recent film, The Dark Knight, has been well-received. This marks the first time the Raindance people's first venture into America, and it might be nice if it wasn't their last, so for God's sake, behave yourselves.

LOS ANGELES: Every Thursday in September, the Silent Movie Theater hosts "Word Is Born: Hip Hop at the Movies, 1979-1984". Included are Hollywood exploitation jobs such as Breakin' and Beat Street, the solid period documentary Style Wars, and on September 25, Beat This! Hip Hop Rarities, winner of this month's Rep Report Award for Promotional Copy That We Have No Intention of Trying to Re-Word: " We've dug even deeper for our closeout night, and we're bringing you some of the rarest cuts in a fantastic mix of rarities from the old-school hip-hop era. Watch them one after the other, obscure odds and ends from the Golden Age, ending with Beat This! A Hip-Hop History! Yup! It’s the history of hip-hop! And it was made in 1984! And it’s all in rhyme! And it’s vocoderized by Afrika Bambaataa! And it’s sci-fi! And it stars BS-ing punk-impresario-turned-double-dutch-promoter Malcolm McLaren in all his patronizing glory! And it was made for Granada TV! And they forced director Dick Fontaine to slip in McLaren against his will, but he couldn’t do anything about it!"

SAN FRANCISCO: Sean McCourt of the Bay Guardian has the dirt on this weekend's Lebowski Fest.

NORTH CAROLINA: The tenth Hi Mom! Film Festival, festuring an international, family-friendly selection of fifty-one animated and live-action shorts, runs this weekend starting tonight, at the Art Center in Carborro. Please note that the outdoor screenings planned for Chapel Hill have been moved indoors due to a "strong threat of rain."

The Rep Report: August 21--27

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: It's that time of year--the humidity-soaked dead space between the last of the real summer movies and the first of the autumn "serious" pictures--where unexpected flurries of stray weirdness count for a lot even in repertory programming. Starting August 21 and running for a week, Anthology Film Archives digs deep into the seamier recesses of the nostalgia glands for a celebration of New York vigilante movies from the 1970s and 1980s. including the official kick-start to the genre: Michael Winner's Death Wish, with Charles Bronson in his most archetypal role, and a movie that Jeff Goldblum (who made his screen debut with a five-second appearance as one of the caterwauling thugs who fuck up Chuck's wife and daughter) has been apologizing for ever since. The schedule also includes Abel Ferrara's moody, arty-looking bloodbath Ms. 45, which is notable for its wordless star performance by the beautiful and doomed Zoe Lund, who would later write Ferrera's Bad Lieutenant under the name Zoe Tamerlis. (She also appeared in that film as one of Harvey Keitel's drug connections. Zoe Tamerlis Lund died in 1999, of a heart attack brought on by cocaine use, at the age of 37.) The schedule also amounts to the closest thing you're ever likely to see to a William Lustig Festival. Lustig, the subject of a new interview in the New York Press, directed the 1988 Maniac Cop (which was written by Larry Cohen and boasts one of the all-time classic B-list casts of its era: Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Sheree North, Richard Roundtree, William "Big Bill" Smith, and the cruelly-underappreciated-by=everyone-except-Larry-Cohen Laurene Landon) and its sequel Maniac Cop 2 as well as the 1983 Vigilante. (Say what you like about Lustig, nobody can accuse him of going in for opaque, misleading titles.) Vigilante, which stars Fred Williamson and my man Robert Forster, has an impressive back-up choir itself in Richard Bright, Joe Spinell, Woody Strode, Joseph Carberry, Rutanya Alda, and Steve James, a talented performer who died young after practically taking out a patent on the category "Action Hero's Sidekick, Black Male." There are people who actually watch the Times Square scenes in Taxi Driver and tear up from thinking about the "good old days." They'll be squeezing them into the theater with a crowbar.

The dog days are also a great time for rummaging in the career of actors who had such long and busy careers that they can to be part of the landscape and rediscovering what they were like when they were walking cult items. The Brooklun Academy of Music is having a three-day Richard Widmark festival from August 25 through the 27th, and the inclusion of the London-set Night and the City makes it an event. This febrile yet moving noir was directed by Jules Dassin, who as it happens died this past March, as did Widmark himself, when both men were in their nineties. Neither ever did better work than they did here.

The Rep Report (August 7-12)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: "The French Crime Wave: Film Noir Thrillers, 1937-2000" at Film Forum, runs August 8 through September 11. The programmers' definition of "thrillers" is pretty loose: it includes not just Henri-Georges Clouzot's great existential nailbiter The Wages of Fear but Robert Besson's existential and ascetic Pickpocket and A Man Escaped, as well as the pure horror poetry of Eyes without a Face. But then the French do take their crime literature seriously. One of the charms of the schedule is the chance to see what the work of a number of famous thriller writers--including Jim Thompson (whose Pop. 1280 and A Hell of a Woman provided the basis for, respectively. Bertrand Tavernier's Clean Slate and Alain Corenau's Serie Noire), Patricia Highsmith (whose The Talented Mr. Ripley was turned into Rene Clement's Purple Noon), and Cornell Woolrich (Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid) looked like after a pass through the French film hopper. The series is dedicated to honorary French director Jules Dassin (b. Middletown, Connecticut), who died last March at the age of 96, and who kicks things off with his influential 1955 caper film Rififi.

Over the course of the last dozen years, the Dardenne brothers have built up a remarkable body of films that address hard questions with intellectual and moral seriousness and with a rigorous filmmaking approach that is never condescending and usually aesthetically stimulating. Starting Thursday and running through the weekend, Anthology Film Archives is showing the films that put and kept them on the world film map: La Promesse, Rosetta, The Child, and perhaps their most extraordinary work, The Son.

The Rep Report (June 5 --11)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:06:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives honors the late work of the consummate entertainer of twentieth-century Hollywood movies, Howard Hawks, with a series devoted to the movies Hawks directed from his 1948 classic Western Red River, with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, through his later masterpiece with Wayne, Rio Bravo, down to their final collaborations (1967's El Dorado, featuring Robert Mitchum and a young James Caan, and the 1970 Rio Lobo, where you get to see Wayne beat up George Plimpton; the cast also includes Jack Elam and later Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox studios chief Sherry Lansing in her starlet days), which were assembled from parts scavenged from their predecessors. For Hawks fans, the series offers a chance to re-evaluate some works not usually ranked among his finest efforts, notably Land of the Pharoahs with Joan Collins, which proved that Hawks was no more a natural at getting English actors to look unembarrassed while pretending to be ancient Egyptians than any other mortal (even, or maybe especially, when he had William Faulkner working on the script) and Man's Favorite Sport?, starring Rock Hudson as an "expert" author of fishing book who thinks fish are disgusting. (The movie receives an extensive subtextual reading in Mark Rappaport's 1992 Rock Hudson's Home Movies.) In fact, the only Hawks feature from 1953's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to the director's death in 1977 that's not included is his ambitious, personal, and disastrous 1965 race-car movie Red Line 7000. Maybe the programmers were afraid to screen it for fear that it still wouldn't look a lot better than Speed Racer.

"Open Roads: New Italian Cinema" (June 6-12) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center showcases the work of what the programmers see as "a new generation of Italian filmmakers .. defined by neither a political position nor an aesthetic approach but unified through a spirit of independence that has allowed them to break away from old models and genres." It includes Biùtiful Cauntri, an eco-minded drama that is being shown in conjunction with the Film Society's "Green Screens" program, and The Waltz, which tells its multi-character story in a single, continuous ninety-minute shot.

Opening today and running through June 15th: "NewFest 2008: The 20th Anniversary NY LGBT Film Festival". On tap and buzzed about: Affinity, Meadowlark, and the documentary SqueezeBox!, a movie whose accompanying party at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival took no prisoners.

BERKELEY: Through June, Pacific Film Archives presents a quartet of punk concert clips and documentaries just in time for anyone looking to get nostalgic over the fortieth anniversary of the summer when London punk in particular was in full, frothing snarl mode. The schedule begins tonight with The Blank Generation, which captures such New York bands as the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Television when they were young, loud, and snotty. Still to come: D.O.A., in which Johnny Rotten does not spend the Sex Pistols' "terminal" American tour desperately looking for the man who's fatally poisoned him, and Penelope Spheeris's first and finest document of noisy West Coast alientation, 1981's The Decline... of Western Civilization.

The Rep Report (May 22--26)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

SEATTLE: The 34th Seattle International Film Festival opens tonight and runs through June 15. The opening night attraction is Battle in Seattle, directed by Stuart "Mr. Charlize Theron" Townsend and starring an ensemble cast led by Charlize Theron. The movie is a "semi-fictionalized account" of the 1999 meeting in Seattle of representatives of the World Trade Organization, which was plagued by demonstrators who thought that globalization sucks, man. (As part of the movie's celebration of down-with-the -street anti-capitalist action, the festival organizers promise an "unforgettable opportunity to walk the red carpet with the stars" to be followed by a "fabulous gala party will follow with live entertainment, and complimentary champagne cocktails and hors d'oeuvres.") For more information and a lot of laughs, check out The Stranger's festival blog.
CAMBRIDGE: Of all movie genres, film noir may be the one that ascribes the most value to the low-rent and obscure and unloved, but by now the contents of the vaults have been through the sluice many times by wild-eyed men looking for the last hidden gold nugget of intense sleaze. So cultists are bound to impressed by the people who assembled Harvard Film Archives's Unseen Noir series (May 23-26) just for making good on their billing. It's a long weekend full of titles you may have heard of but probably haven't seen by directors you know you need to catch up on: Joseph H. Lewis's My Name Is Julia Ross with Nina Foch and Dame Mae Whitty; Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall with Brian Keith, Aldo Rey and a young Anne Bancroft; Andre' de Toth's Pitfall; and a double bill of Phil Karlson pictures: The Brothers Rico, starring Richard Conte in a loose adaptation of a Simenon novel, and 99 River Street, which has a great poster showing a rabid-looking John Payne apparently being restrained from chain-whipping a street sign that has the effrontery to bear the film's title.

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives celebrates Memorial Day with a four-day weekend's worth of Korean films about the Korean War and its aftereffects, from May 22 through the 25th. Included are Lee Man-Hui' The Marines Who Never Returned, the 1984 Warm Winter Was Gone, and 2000's Joint Security Area, directed by Chan-wook Park, who has since become best known in the West for the films in his "venegance trilogy", including Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance.

For those balmy summer nights, the IFC Center launches a series of Friday and Satuday midnight screenings of sci-fi cult classics, to run through June. Things kick off this weekend with the scientifically accurate Alien before taking a massive nosedive in the plausibility department with the original 1978 TV pilot-turned-"feature film" Battlestar Galactica and John Boorman's giggle-a-minute Zardoz. Also on tap: David Lynch's love letter to the city of Philadelphia Eraserhead (he didn't film it there, but it was his way of telling it that he wasn't coming back), Woody Allen's Sleeper, and the original, feral Mad Max.

The Rep Report (March 26 - April 2)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: "The Clash of '68" (March 27 - April 23) at Pacific Film Archives commemorates the fortieth anniversary of May 1968, a time of intense political unrest across the globe and, what seems even more remarkable now, a time when those tensions were reflected in a series of high-profile movies. In its efforts to convey the full range of "revolutionary" political cinema at the time, the programming mixes some especially choice examples (including Alain Tanner's 1975 comedy Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000, from a screenplay by John Berger; Bertolucci's Before the Revolution and Godard's La Chinoise; Costa-Gavras's torn-from-the-headlines thriller Z, which rewrote the rules on packaging political content in a commercial form; and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers required viewing at the Pentagon for those trying to learn how to fight an insurgency, and its controversial follow-up, Queimada! (better known here as Burn!) starring Marlon Brando) with such obscurities and oddities as The Revolutionary (1970), an allegorical look at campus activism starring young Jon Voight as a fellow called "A." (Attention, Steve Ditko!) Especially notable: A Grin without a Cat, one of the documentarian Chris Marker's obsessive yet playful meditations on where the heck we've been and how we all ended up here. Show up twenty minutes ahead of screening time and listen to Pacifica Radio's "Revolution Rewind Moments", aural montages of high points from 1968 as captured by news radio microphones. (The program is presented in conjunction with the exhibit Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg", at Berkeley Art Museum.)

Also at PFA: "Heinz Emigholz: Architecture as Autobiography" (April 1 - April 17) brings together five of the German filmmaker's "Photography and Beyond" documentaries, focusing on such architects as Louis Sullivan, Bruce Goff, and Rudolph Schindler. Emigholz will be in attendance at several of the screenings.

NEW YORK: Starting March 26, the Anthology Film Archives dusts off two of the early comedies of writer-director-star Albert Brooks. Like Woody Allen's earliest stuff, these movies are spotty, erratic, and not always so easy on the eyes, yet keep hitting wild streaks of comic inspiration that could have come from nobody else. Brooks's first film as a triple threat, the 1979 Real Life, in which he plays a documentarian who invades a "normal American family" household, was once a parody of the PBS series An American Family and now looks like a prescient vision of a time when it would seem as if nobody could walk to the bathroom without tripping over a camera cord. 1981's Modern Romance, about a malfunctioning love affair (between Brooks and Kathryn Harrold) that proves too dysfunctional to simply die, features a Qualuude-fueled routine by Brooks that's as funny as any five minutes of footage from the '80s.