August 4-10, 2005

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Midnight Movies(Sat., Aug. 6, midnight, Starz Encore) From Alejandro Jodorowsky's psychotropic Western El Topo to David Lynch's endlessly creepy Eraserhead, Stuart Samuels' engaging documentary charts the midnight movie's journey "from the margins to the mainstream." Samuels (Visions of Light) touches on the broad social changes that made the counterculture commercially viable, but avoids overbroadening his subject by focusing on a relatively small number of films: Night of the Living Dead, Pink Flamingos, The Harder They Come and The Rocky Horror Picture Show bring it to an even half-dozen. More than the directors or the critics (J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, who literally wrote the book on the subject), the unsung heroes who emerge from Samuels' doc are the programmers: Ben Barenholtz, who created the midnight movie phenomenon when he booked El Topo into New York's now-defunct Elgin Theater, and Larry Jackson of Boston's Orson Welles Cinema, who recalls, "I saw that you could create a whole world around the concept of midnight."

Barenholtz, who later produced some of the Coen brothers' best movies, emerges as a particularly tenacious champion. While most midnight movies were overnight hits (at least once they were exiled from the regular circuit), Barenholtz endured a "two-year grind" before Eraserhead started packing them in — compare that to today, when even art houses will pull a film after a single lackluster weekend. In the end, video killed the midnight movie, at least as a social phenomenon (although vid-store culture ironically cemented the triumph of the midnight-movie aesthetic); as John Waters points out, now you could smoke pot and have sex while watching movies without fear of discovery. But anyone who's experienced the special thrill of sitting with a packed audience as the movie rolls into the a.m. knows that something's been lost as well as gained. And speaking of midnight movies…

Exhuming Exhumed Films (Sat., Aug. 6, 8 p.m., $12, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542, www.ihousephilly.com) Exhumed Films, the city's premier showcase for cult and horror films, knows a thing or two about coming back from the dead, enough to survive the loss of its third venue in the last six years. After Pitman's Broadway Theatre went belly up, following in the footsteps of the Harwan and Hoyt's, the Exhumed folks have landed at International House, which makes up in cleanliness and solvency what it lacks in grindhouse elan. Lamberto Bava's oft-sequelized Demons, in which onscreen demons wreak bloody havoc on theater patrons, opens a characteristically generous triple-bill. Let's Scare Jessica to Death, a Gaslight rewrite in which a woman emerges from an asylum only to discover she may be a vampire, fills the number two slot, and the night ends with Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, which features a hippie theater troupe getting eaten by zombies. (Director Bob Clark, whose resumé ranges from Deathdream to A Christmas Story, is readying a Children remake as his follow-up to Baby Geniuses 2.) Welcome Exhumed to its new home, and visit its Web site for info on September's mouthwatering Cronenberg doubleheader and other future programs.

Point Blank ($19.97 DVD) Less an anomaly for director John Boorman than star Lee Marvin, this prismatic 1967 neo-noir plays like a more brutal Blow-Up. When his gangland bosses try to murder him rather than pay up 93 grand, Marvin's aptly named Walker hits the bricks, embarking on an odyssey of vengeance and a search for two kinds of payback. Boorman's time jumps are frankly pretentious, but Marvin's lacerating sense of purpose gives the movie the lead anchor it needs. Among the surprises in Boorman's commentary chat with Steven Soderbergh is that Marvin defended the movie against studio interference, effectively ceding his final cut to Boorman, which indicates there was a lot more going on behind those steely eyes than some might imagine. As with Boorman's Deliverance, there's something seedy about Boorman's art-house take on blood reprisal, as if he wanted to handle it without getting his hands dirty. But Marvin plunges in fists-first and lands a knockout.

Tomorrow We Move ($29.95 DVD) The only thing that kept Chantal Akerman's giddy, overwhelming farce off my list of 2004's best movies was the gamble that it would play Philadelphia in 2005. No such luck, although for once we're hardly alone. Apart from festival screenings, the latest movie from the director of Jeanne Dielman and Je tu il elle — and, incidentally, her most accessible in nearly a decade — went without a theatrical opening anywhere in the U.S., a sad commentary on the state of art-house distribution. Thankfully, KimStim stepped in where theater owners feared to tread, releasing the film in an anamorphic transfer (albeit with nonremovable subtitles and no extras) that preserves Akerman's precise compositions. A quasi-remake of Akerman's Man with the Suitcase, a near-wordless burlesque in which Akerman plays a writer bedeviled by the unannounced comings and goings of an unwanted houseguest, Tomorrow stars Sylvie Testud as a frazzled writer forced to share a cramped duplex with her oversexed mother, whose constant activities inevitably worm their way into Testud's prose. Opening with a piano dangling precariously in midair, Akerman's manic farce runs, at nearly two hours, longer than a high-pitched comedy should, but the film seems to work your nerves on purpose, testing the audience's endurance as surely as, if more enjoyably than, the slow-moving Jeanne Dielman and D'Est. (Fittingly, an untranslated joke at the end of the movie turns comedy into a dirty word, finishing a litany of mots cochons with the word "comique.") Akerman's comedies, which rarely figure in assessments of her oeuvre, are generally funnier in theory than practice, but due in no small part to Testud's razor-sharp performance (as well as a supporting cast that includes Aurore Clément, Lucas Belvaux, Natacha Régnier and Elsa Zylberstein), Tomorrow is often uproarious, although the humor is fraught with something more sinister. Desperate to find her own place, Testud consults with a real estate agent who comments that the smell of disinfectant reminds him of the gas chambers, and idly recalls, "I knew a Weinstein — once." As Testud's writing takes a sudden turn towards the pornographic, Tomorrow We Move builds to a frantic climax relieved by a delightful twist it would be a shame to spoil here. A gas from start to finish but not without its barbs, Tomorrow is a minor masterpiece from a director scandalously underrepresented on DVD. More, please.