October 23-29, 2003
screen picks
Release the Bats! (starts Thu., Oct. 23, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700) Not likely to run out of ammunition anytime soon, the Prince reprises last year's men-with-teeth showcase. There's F.W. Murnau's towering Nosferatu (Fri., 8 p.m., $10) with live accompaniment, a hipster double-bill of Michael Almereyda's Nadja (Sat., 7 p.m., $8.50) and Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark (Sat., 9:30 p.m., $8.50) and Vampyr by silent master Carl Theodor Dreyer (Sun., 5 p.m., free, shown on video). For the kids, there's Daffy Duck's Quackbusters (Sat., 3 p.m., free) and Monster Mash (Sun., 7 p.m., $8.50). While it's not the best in the series, the one movie you want to make sure to catch on the big screen is Bram Stoker's Dracula (Thu., 7:30 p.m., $8.50), Francis Ford Coppola's gorgeously overwrought 1992 version. As a whole, Coppola's take, with Gary Oldman as the spectacularly coifed bloodsucker, is close to ludicrous, but it's also a love letter to the cinema, photographed with dreamy abandon by Michael Ballhaus. Tune out Winona and Keanu and just let the imagery flow. More vamp flicks next week.
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms/The Valley of Gwangi ($19.98 each DVD) Although special effects have become more and more central to Hollywood filmmaking, and more recognized as a distinct art form, no one working in the field today can ever hope to match Ray Harryhausen for name recognition. Few could name the director of Clash of the Titans or The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, but Harryhausen's animated creatures are instantly recognizable, and without equal.
Speaking by phone from his home in London, Harryhausen recalls how seeing King Kong, with its stop-motion Kong created by Willis O'Brien, changed his life: "It was awesome, like nothing that had been put on the screen before." Eventually, Harryhausen found his way into the business and became O'Brien's apprentice, climaxing with his work on Mighty Joe Young (1949). Harryhausen followed O'Brien's example in moving away from stylized "puppet films," a term he uses with some small derision, and toward "the concept of a single figure," realistically animated. "We have one figure that's a character in the melodrama, and it goes through the film as a character, and not as a puppet."
Harryhausen learned another lesson from Mighty Joe Young. That movie, he recalls, "cost an awful lot," with the cumbersome studio process necessitating a work force of nearly four dozen, including "four projectionists who would come in the morning, set up the projectors and then do nothing the rest of the day." When he struck out on his own, with 1953's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Harryhausen chose to keep costs down. "I just felt, if stop-motion's going to survive, we've got to make it for a reasonable sum. So I went to almost the opposite extreme, and ended up working on very low-budget movies, almost by myself. One result: Beast's monstrous octopus only has six arms, to cut down on the time it took to animate. Jokes Harryhausen, If we'd cut the budget any more it would probably have been a tripod.
Though real-life creatures never interested Harryhausen -- the elephant in The Valley of Gwangi (1969) was animated only after the studio failed to produce a live pachyderm of sufficient size -- he strove for realism, though he cautions, If you make it too real, it loses the quality of fantasy. Stop-motion has this quality of a dream; it looks real, but you know it isn't. Jason and the Argonauts' skeleton fight has been justly praised, but there's something entrancing, even beautiful about Gwangi's eohippus, a prehistoric mini-horse, several inches tall, and lifelike in a way that CGI hasn't begun to touch.
Would that all the acting were so good. Some critics said, šIt's a pity Mr. Harryhausen couldn't animate the actors,' he recalls, unable to think of a favorite human performance in any of his movies. We've always had competent actors, but it takes time, and when you're working on a low budget, things have to be done quickly. Harryhausen's memoir, An Animated Life, is published in the U.K. next month, and in the U.S. sometime next year.
United Nations Film Festival (through Oct. 26, $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, www.unagp.org) The words "United Nations" are apt to provoke a strong response these days, from those who see it as savior or goat. Programmed by the U.N. Association of Greater Philadelphia, this film and discussion series offers ample evidence for both sides. There's no better example of the yin and the yang than Thursday night's program, which kicks off at 7 with the British Palestine is Still the Issue, followed by the French/Israeli/U.S. Human Weapon. An ostensible correction to media bias that merely succeeds in minimizing Palestinian atrocities and pooh-poohing Israeli security concerns, Palestine is merely appalling. Even from a pro-Palestinian perspective, it's absurdly one-sided, eagerly detailing how Palestinians have "risen up against Israel's military machine," while ignoring the reasons for said machine's existence..
Human Weapon will strike some as an equally sympathetic portrait of suicide bombers, but rather than propagandize, it puts their actions in context. The film returns to the birth of suicide attacks, in 1983 Beirut, and details how the Islamist "culture of martyrdom" is in fact a recent creation, a deliberate perversion of Quranic text by fanatical leaders. Suicide bombers are turned into instant media heroes by outlets like Hezbollah TV; one bomber's family watches footage of the plume of smoke rising from his attack, as the TV plays it over and over again. Meanwhile, an Israeli doctor looks sadly at an X-ray of a hexagonal nut lodged in a victim's spine, not trained to deal with the shrapnel wounds inflicted by suicide bombers who pack scrap metal on top of their explosives. The films are accompanied by speakers Larry Davidson and Janet Amighi, and moderator Craig Eisendrath.
Saturday night's program opens at 7 with The Philadelphia Story, a brief portrait of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, followed by Cry for Argentina, which details the fallout of the country's recent financial crisis. Though opening narration lays the blame on globalization, no supporting evidence materializes; instead, we see a country where the government's currency manipulations have laid waste to people's life savings, and reality-TV contestants compete for the right to work an entry-level job. Watching one woman, whose $180,000 family fortune has dwindled to around $50,000, run her daily route past dozens of ATMs that sometimes relinquish money and sometimes don't, the situation may seem awfully foreign. But as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman details in his new book, The Great Unraveling, the Bush administration's policies bear an uncomfortable resemblance to those preceding economic collapses in other countries. Caveat emptor.
Trembling Before G-d (Thu., Oct. 23, 7:30 p.m., free, Lang Performing Arts Center, Swarthmore College, 610-328-8200) Sandi Dubowski's documentary about gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews has apparently spawned a movement, and a lexicon: As detailed on the "Trembling on the Road" documentary on New Yorker's new double DVD, one visitor to the film's website recalled overhearing the whispered phrase, "He's a trembler." Dubowski brings the film to Swarthmore Thursday night, and is sure to lead a lively discussion afterward.
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