December 9–16, 1999
screen picks
The Lost Film and Music Matinee:2.0 (Dec. 12, 3-10 p.m., $5, 39th St. and Lancaster Ave., 215 662-0397) After the "rousing success" (their words) of the first installment, the LFM folks have rounded up another batch of renegade filmmakers for an afternoon of movies, performance and punk haircuts. Featured again are the films of Heavy Metal Parking Lot’s Jeff Krulik, who didn’t quite make it up the last time around, as well as Threat, which touts itself as "the first contemporary independent film by kids and about kids." According to co-creators Katie Nisa and Matt Pizzolo, the film is like a "cross between a video game and a comic book," a description which is either tantalizing or very, very frightening. There’s only one way to find out. Nisa, Pizzolo and Krulik will take part in a discussion on a guerilla filmmaking, and speaking of guerillas, LFM collective member Scott Beiben says he’s bringing an 18-minute documentary on the WTO protests back with him from Seattle. (It was filmed on Nov. 30 and edited the following night.) Considering the power of the images that made it onto CNN, you can only imagine what you’ll see on a tape that hasn’t been filtered through the official media.
Time Bandits (Dec. 11 and 18, 1:45 p.m., County Theater, 20 E. State St., Doylestown, 215-345-6789) Part of the County’s ongoing Saturday Kids’ Matinee series, this is one of Terry Gilliam’s weirdest and best movies. I still remember being infuriated by the film’s about-face ending as a child, but it certainly isn’t something you forget. There’s a certain appealing grottiness to this and other early Gilliams that vanished once he got to Hollywood and started working with the budgets he’d always wanted — it was gratifying to see him learn how to cover up the stitches, but he lost some of his organic funk as well. The time-tripping opus features appearances by Gilliam’s Monty Python buddies John Cleese and Michael Palin (who co-wrote with Gilliam) as well as Brazil screenwriter Charles McKeown, Sean Connery, Shelley Duvall, Ian Holm and Sir Ralph Richardson.
