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Also this issue: Just Her Type Pleasure Principals 8 Women |
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September 26-October 2, 2002
screen picks
aLucky Bum Film Tour (Sat., Sept. 28 and Sun., Sept. 29, 8 p.m., $5-$10, Space 1026, 1026 Arch St., www.peripheralproduce.com) There's a filmmaking subculture that's increasingly making its presence felt, one that combines activism, documentary, personal essay and a freewheeling, self-conscious approach to craft. And these filmmakers like to tour. Philadelphia's Termite TV took off across the country in a beat-up bus; Chicago's Lo-Fi Landscapes came through in June, and now there's the Lucky Bum Film Tour. Hailing from Portland, Ore., Vanessa Renwick and Bill Daniel are traversing the country to present a series of "hit and run" screenings, as well as Daniel's film-based installation "The Girl on the Train in the Moon." "Girl," which includes a video campfire and moon-shaped screen, compiles footage from Daniel's investigation-in-progress "Who Is Bozo Texino?," which looks at the world of hobo train-car riders and their secret language of boxcar graffiti. Renwick's films explore a variety of styles, from environmental agitprop to open-ended performance pieces. The longest, and the highlight of the preview tape provided, is "Richart," a 23-minute profile of Richard Tracy, the owner and perpetrator of a junkyard-cum-art installation who, among other things, is obsessed with the number five. Visitors, free in groups of five or less -- "but not two" -- are invited to tour his yard, taking found-metal sculptures (five or less free) with them. Tours last 55 minutes; if you stay longer, Tracy warns, "I'll have to write you up." It comes as no surprise when Tracy mentions he was once institutionalized, emerging with this advice: "If you want to get out of the mental hospital, start building art like this. They'll get rid of you immediately." But Renwick and co-director Dawn Smallman never condescend to their subject.
Questioning Faith (Tue., Oct. 1, 8 p.m., free, Future Minima Showroom, 47-49 N. Second St., www.mixedgreens.com) A nine-day series of events showcasing Mixed Greens, the New York-based art seller and documentary producer, includes this screening of Macky Alston's literally soul-searching documentary, which showed during this year's Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Alston (Family Name) is a gay seminary student whose crisis of faith comes to a head after a friend and fellow student dies of AIDS. "What kind of theology is credible in the face of that?" he wonders. The film's implicit subject is suffering, and how it squares with belief in any kind of god: Alston interviews an Asian Buddhist whose father was shot dead when she was a child; a Jew whose family was almost wiped out during the Holocaust; a Muslim with a life-threatening illness; and of course, his friend's family. Some have been driven to despair or disbelief, others found their faith strengthened; in the end, there are not only no answers, but a different set of questions. The first-person documentary is perhaps ideally suited for this kind of personal questioning, although you wish sometimes Alston had adopted a slightly more personal, less rote formal approach -- it's clear "bringing people together through film" is as much a part of his ministry as his divinity studies, but there's something slightly impersonal about the way he tells this very personal journey. Alston will present the film and expand on his journey in a Q&A after the film. Check Mixed Greens' website for further details on their Philadelphia residency, which includes events most nights from 6 to 8 p.m.
Near Dark ($29.98 DVD; Sat., Sept. 27 with The Viy, 11 p.m., Hoyt's Cinemas, Rtes. 38 and 70, Pennsauken, 856-910-2340, www.exhumedfilms.com) Following a screening of the 1967 Russian creeper The Viy, based on the Gogol story that inspired Mario Bava's Black Sunday, Exhumed Films presents a screening of Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 cult favorite, also recently released on DVD. Aspiring, as she says in the lengthy retrospective documentary on Anchor Bay's DVD, to make "the first non-Gothic vampire movie," Bigelow crossbred Bram Stoker with Zane Grey (and a touch of The Wild One) to create a sort of Western-vampire-biker hybrid more notable for its influence than itself. Bigelow (Point Break, Strange Days, K-19: The Widowmaker) has long been a favorite of pop-addled feminist academics for the minor twists she introduces into action genre pics, like the camera-caressed naked woman who reveals herself to be a lethal martial arts threat in Point Break. But Bigelow's more interested in getting off on her own nihilism than seriously reworking the genre; Near Dark doesn't interrogate so much as it supercharges, stripping away the garlic and crosses to get down to the blood and guts. Bigelow's undead biker gang, with its quorum of Aliens veterans -- Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein had all worked for Bigelow's husband (and ex)-to-be James Cameron the year before -- seems more interested in mayhem than exsanguinations; the bloodsucking is almost an afterthought, a chaser for the taste of random violence. Much is made in the DVD's liner notes of the (supposedly) unfair triumph of The Lost Boys over Near Dark when the two were released almost simultaneously, but at least Joel Schumacher had the sense to play his immortals' death obsession for camp. Even when Near Dark's vamps are trading lines like "Remember that fire we started in Chicago?," they do it with the gravitas of gravediggers. The exception is Paxton's thrill jockey Severen (named, no doubt, for the character in the Velvet Underground song), who's as juicy (and as Texan) a character as the Frailty director has ever played -- which almost compensates for the stiffness of leads Adrian Pasdar (TV's Profit) and Jenny Wright. Credit where credit is due, though: Without Near Dark's band of booze-swilling, RV-driving, attitude-copping vamps, it's doubtful we'd have Buffy's Spike, and that would make a lot of people I know very unhappy indeed.
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Copenhagen (Sun., Sept. 29, 9 p.m., WHYY-TV) Howard Davies' adaptation of Michael Frayn's Tony-winning play isn't enormously cinematic -- you swoon to think what Robert Altman might have done with Frayn's endlessly shifting narrators and time frames -- but it gets the job done. Set largely in Copenhagen during the Second World War, when Werner Heisenberg (Daniel Craig) paid a legendary but unrecorded visit to Niels Bohr (Stephen Rea) and his wife (Francesca Annis), the play makes much of uncertainty, both to Heisenberg's version and its literary/historical analog. Frayn, like anyone else, can only speculate on what the two celebrated physicists might have said to each other: Bohr, a Jew in an occupied country, Heisenberg, a German in the service of his. Frayn's play aroused controversy for its (hypothetically) sympathetic portrait of Heisenberg, portrayed as a fifth columnist in the Nazi ranks. Davies' version isn't as exciting as the play probably is on the stage, and Frayn's casual insertion of historical dates into the dialogue seems needlessly creaky for the screen. But the carefully worked-out interplay of ideas is genuinely fascinating, the performances modulated without being mannered. Copenhagen is the rare straight play to spawn a national tour without a marquee lead; Davies' version at least gives you a taste of why.
Issues in Black Independent Cinema: The Documentary (Tue., Oct. 1, 7 p.m., free with required reservation, University of Pennsylvania, 209 S. 33rd St., David Rittenhouse Labs, Rm. A-5, 215-735-3785, inquiry@scribe.org) This eight-week-long program begins with new work by Scribe head Louis Massiah, who will show Louise Alone Thompson Patterson: In Her Own Words, about the activist and Harlem Renaissance cultural worker, and A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown, a far-reaching portrait of Philadelphia's anarchist community.
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