Screen Picks

The Brothers Quay/Michael O’Reilly

(Wed., April 25, 7 p.m., Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, 200 S. Madison St., Wilmington, DE, 302-656-6466, www.thedcca.org)

Norristown expatriates Stephen and Timothy Quay return to the area to screen their latest short, In Absentia, about a woman struggling to write a letter from within the confines of an asylum. (Oddly enough, though the Bros. Quay created the trailer for the PFWC, none of their work is scheduled to screen there.) Also on the bill is local mainstay Michael O’Reilly, screening his new In the Shadow of the Shortest Saint. Using his characteristically edit-intensive style applied to new emotional depth, Shadow mixes stories as freely as it does media, weaving fractured relationships, dead pets and human tragedy into an elegiac tapestry of loss where threads tangle and even choke each other off. But the whole coheres all the same.

Youth Media Jam II

(Wed., April 18 – Sat., April 21, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St. 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org)

The Prince’s second Youth Media Jam features videos and films by, for and about kids, and workshops designed to help them make their own. Programs include "Out There," Paper Tiger TV’s look at the only gay group home in New York City (Fri., 6:30) and the climactic "Youth Video Slam" (Sat., 7:30), where the first 20 kids to show up with a ready-to-play videotape will have up to six minutes shown on the Prince’s big, big screen.

From Philadelphia With Love 2

(Fri., April 20, 8 p.m., Moore College of Art & Design, 20th & Race Sts., 215-568-4515, ext. 4099, www.voicenet.com/~jschwart)

Secret Cinema’s second collection of "industrial, educational and other lost local films" includes Important People, a 1950 short which advises trolley drivers to treat their riders kindly, and A Bridge Is Born, a look at the creation of the Walt Whitman Bridge, introduced by filmmaker Gino Aureli.

The Ice Storm

($24.98 DVD)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon may be Ang Lee’s most successful film, but it’s far from his most profound. For me, the problem with Lee’s movies (regardless of setting) has always been their emotional frigidity, a certain studied, clinical feel which overwhelmed everything from Ride with the Devil’s epic sweep to Crouching Tiger’s stunning acrobatics. (For all the complaints I’ve heard from art-house patrons irked by the film’s chatty audiences, I can’t help but think it would be less of a problem if the parts of the film which don’t involve people kicking each other weren’t so dull.) But The Ice Storm takes Lee’s weakness and makes it his strength; it’s a movie about emotional frigidity, which Lee certainly knows inside and out. Having grown up in what I’ve come to refer to as "Ice Storm country" (at least when I’m not feeling sour enough to call it "Alex Kelly country"), I can attest to the film’s sharply sculpted portrait of a monied subculture where protocol suffocates emotion, where emotional trauma is viewed mainly as a disturbance in the social order. (It’s amazing, in fact, how many similiarities The Ice Storm has with movies like The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, as if the mores of Edith Wharton’s New York hadn’t died out, but merely moved to the suburbs.) Here, Lee’s controlled compositions reflect the sterile aesthetics of suburban Connecticut in the 1970s, a cold so deep no polyester print can shatter it. Even though "masterpiece" is a word I don’t use, I’m tempted to employ it here.

Tigerland

($29.98 DVD, video priced for rental)

Take away Joel Schumacher’s toys and the veteran schlockmeister is forced to actually direct. In this little-seen, barely-distributed 2000 release, Irishman Colin Farrell (who has somewhat desperately been anointed the next big thing, even if the vast majority of Americans haven’t even had, let alone taken advantage of, the opportunity to see him) stars as Roland Bozz, a sass-mouthed Texan who’s become a sort of legend among the troops training to go to Vietnam in 1971. From a script co-written by veteran Ross Klavan, Tigerland is like a more bloody-minded, less clever Catch-22; Bozz is a mercurial antiauthoritarian with a special bent for getting other conscripts discharged, but the movie keeps falling back on shouting-drill-instructor clichés and has to keep reminding us that for all his troublemaking, Bozz is still a good soldier. Shot by Requiem for a Dream’s Matthew Libatique, Tigerland has a gritty, 16mm feel, but you sense Shumacher’s confusion with its complex story, like he’s forever waiting for Batman to swing in and clean things up.