“The cinema is always as perfect as it can be”

Posting may continue to be light for awhile, what with the beginning of the fall term and football season and autumn weather and all, but the Pittsburgh Film Calendar at the top of the sidebar is as up-to-date as I know how to make it. Among the events I recently added are the screening dates for the “Pittsburgh Neighborhood Narratives” films that were commissioned as part of the city’s 250th birthday celebration, the weekly screenings in the Amigos del Cine Latinoamericano Latin American film series, a “Japanese Film Festival” sponsored by Pitt’s Asian Studies Center, and screenings included on Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ September calendar.

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While poking around the blog Quiet Bubble earlier today I rediscovered a website where some industrious soul has made 2,846 short reviews by Pauline Kael available online. I’ve added this site to my Film Blogs, Etc. custom search engine. Huzzah!

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I would be remiss were I not to mention the passing of the film critic Manny Farber on this blog. To read more about the man and his work, see David Hudson’s GreenCine Daily post “Manny Farber, 1917 - 2008.” I am in the process of extensively reevaluating my beliefs about film criticism; if I am careful, and honest, and thorough, then one day I’ll have something meaningful to say about Farber. In the meantime I hope it is enough to note that he left us plenty to think about.

The other night I dreamed a documentary about the 1960 presidential election. I don’t remember it very clearly, but I think the “filmmakers” were arguing that Nixon, who they regarded as a moderate, lost because he let someone in his campaign push him too far to the right. This must be related somehow to the recent release of Docurama’s Robert Drew Kennedy Films Collection, which I got in the mail the other day. Weird.

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Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ August calendar is now available as .PDF from their website. It includes the date of next month’s Pittsburgh Film Society event (which will be held in conjunction with a screening of Encounters at the End of the World [2007]), information about a free outdoor film series in Schenley Plaza (Duck Soup (1933) is one of the films that will be shown), and a peak at what’s on tap for September.

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An article called “$50 million Poli project will reshape Squirrel Hill” that ran in the Post-Gazette two weeks ago suggests that the days of the CineMagic Squirrel Hill Theater on Forward Avenue are numbered. There’s nothing about this on CineMagic’s website and no one there replied to my e-mail inquiry, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

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I’ve been looking forward to the start of football season more than usual this year, but I’m still surprised by how bummed out I was by this. Le sigh.

Above is a diagram I asked a friend put together for me to help with the Pixar post I’ve been talking about for awhile. I’ve finally started stitching it together, so if you don’t here from me for a week or two, that’s why.

I was going to post something about next month’s Sunday night series at Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ Regent Square Theater “Life on Mars” today, but I’ve decided to hold off until I’ve seen the Carnegie International, which it’s named after. I want to catch Sharon Lockhart’s film Pine Flat (2006), so the earliest I’ll be able to go is next Thursday. Since whatever I post won’t be a “preview,” here, instead, is an observation:

This isn’t the most daring lineup of films, but everything included is something that really should be seen on the big screen. Blow-Up (1966) is about looking at the world and Playtime (1967) is about living in it; these are big themes and both films require space to be effective. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) requires the dark theater: the extent to which it affects you is the extent to which it envelops you. Brazil (1985) is a mechanical film and it needs a noisy projector, preferably one that has seen better days. Alphaville (1965) is simply a fantastic film, and all good movies should be seen the way their makers intended them to be, which in this case is means in a place not unlike Regent Square.

For more information, check out Filmmakers’ showtimes page. I’m planning on seeing 2001, Playtime, and Alphaville.

The upcoming Kevin Smith film Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008) will feature a hockey team called the Monroeville Zombies (you can actually buy a jersey here). Brilliant. As any movie-minded person knows, Pittsburgh and zombies go together like Bogart and Bacall, like Nick and Nora, like Ingmar Bergman and the crushing weight of existential despair. The association is so strong in my mind that I can no longer indulge in illicit narcotics for fear that I will, once again, end up cowering in a corner convinced that it has begun.

It is, therefore, with great pleasure that I pass on to you news of an upcoming Zombie Film Festival. Every Friday night in August the Warhol Museum will honor our city’s proud cinematic heritage by showing films about the undead. The fest kicks off on August 1 with a screening of Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006) that director Lloyd Kaufman himself will attend. It will then continue with a series of four double-features. For more information and to purchase tickets online, check out the Warhol’s calendar. Here’s the full schedule:

August 1: Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006) w/ Lloyd Kaufman (more info/tickets)
August 8: The Return of the Living Dead (1985) and Dead Alive (1985) (more info/tickets)
August 15: The Children (1980) and The House by the Cemetery (1981) (more info/tickets)
August 22: Night of the Comet (1984) and Night of the Creeps (1986) (more info/tickets)
August 29: Boy Eats Girl (2005) and Dead & Breakfast (2004) (more info/tickets)

I nabbed the picture that tops this post from Peter Sciretta at /Film. For old time’s sake, here’s a classic Onion scoop: “Study Reveals Pittsburgh Unprepared For Full-Scale Zombie Attack.” That is all.

As noted in the comments section of my last post, Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ August schedule has been posted to everyone’s favorite local messageboard. Print versions are now available at Filmmakers theaters, so a .PDF version should show up at their website soon, too (Updated 7/30/08: and here it is). The Regent Square Theater is the place to be this month: Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2008) opens there on August 8, Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007) opens there on August 29, and the August Sunday night series called “Life on Mars: New Perspectives,” is, in a word, awesome.

I’m also probably going to shamble down the street to the Melwood Screening Room to see Sputnik Mania (2007) and make the trudge to the Harris Theater one day after work to see the Darby Crash biopic What We Do Is Secret (2007); both films open on August 15.

GreenCine Daily’s David Hudson has collected reviews of Encounters at the End of the World here and reviews of My Winnipeg here; J. Hoberman reviews both films in one Voice article here.

More on the Sunday night series in a few days: I’m working on a “preview”. . . .

Updated 7/26/08: I’ve changed my mind. Instead of previewing this series I’m going to wait until I’ve had a chance to check out the International and see Pine Flat (2006) at the Museum and then write something about the film series as part of the exhibition.

Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ July calendar is now available as a .PDF from their website. Highlights for me include a Sunday night series devoted to Richard Widmark that features three films I haven’t seen and one I’ve been meaning to revisit (Pickup on South Street [1953]), a screening of a “rare 35mm print” of Les Carabiniers (1963), and the local premieres of three films that played at Cannes last year, Jellyfish (2007), Mister Lonely (2007), and My Brother Is an Only Child (2007).

I’m looking forward to the Widmark series the most. As the tributes piled up after his death on March 26 of this year (David Hudson has gathered many of them together at GreenCine Daily) I became increasingly chagrined by the fact that I’ve seen only one of his films, Pickup on South Street. Here’s a chance to do something about it. Kiss of Death (1947), in addition to being my second Widmark film, will also be only the second movie I’ve seen that was directed by Henry Hathaway (after Call Northside 777 [1948]).

I’m also pretty psyched to see The Carabiniers (1963). In preparation for a graduate course on late Godard that I’m taking in the fall, I’ve been trying to spend some time with his early work, so the timing is perfect. I’ll try to at least start reading Richard Brody’s Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by then, too.

Of the three Cannes ‘07 films, I’m most interested in My Brother Is an Only Child. I only recently decided that I wanted to see this film after . . . let’s say the fourth time I saw a preview for it. Even the most negative review of it on Metacritic, by Michael Atkinson (writing for the Chicago Reader), calls it “a peppery pleasure.” All I’m hoping for is a solid film, so that’s a good sign. I’m curious about Mister Lonely. It might have “the power to touch, to unsettle and to charm” (that’s what A.O. Scott says in the New York Times), but it might be “insufferably twee” (as TVGuide.com’s Ken Fox has it); maybe I’ll think it’s both. I guess we’ll see!

The best of the rest: OSS 117 (2006) might be fun, The Singing Revolution (2006) might be interesting, the screening of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985) on July 3 is free (more info in my calendar entry for this event), and July’s Film Kitchen features tENTATIVELY a cONVIENCE, one of the more prominent local avant-garde filmmakers.

As a nice treat, this month’s calendar also gives us a sneak peak of what’s on tap for August. There’s some great stuff on the way, including Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2007), Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007), and a terrific Sunday night series called “Life on Mars” (the theme of this year’s Carnegie International), proving once again that August is only a bad month for moviegoing if you restrict yourself to the multiplexes.

You might already know that Pixar’s latest opus WALL·E (2008) opens on Friday, but are you aware of all the other great film stuff going on in Pittsburgh next weekend?

On Friday director Eric Zala will bring his film Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation (1989) to the Warhol Museum for a 7pm screening. If you haven’t already heard about this film, check out this expanded version of an article Mike Russell wrote about it for The Oregonian. Basically, it’s a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), a movie that cost almost $20 million to make, that Zala and two of his friends (who were all around ten years-old when they started filming) made for about $5,000 over the course of seven years. Here’s a link to this event’s calendar entry at the Warhol’s website, where you can purchase tickets online; Raiders: The Adaptation has sold out screenings in other cities, so it might be prudent to get yours sooner rather than later.

The fun continues on Saturday with Jefferson Presents’ June 2008 program. This month, JP features two films by my favorite local filmmaker Ross Nugent, Werner Nekes’ Kelek (1969), and a selection of cartoons by Bill Brand short films by Bill Brand called Cartoons (1975).

The screengrab at the top of this post is from a film called The Memex Was Never Built (2006), Ross’ contribution to the DVD issue (Bumba IV) of Encyclopedia Destructica. While I enjoy all of Ross’ films, I like the more abstract ones (like this) best. Watching one of these movies is, for me, like watching something by Jordan Belson:

1. Initially, I’m overwhelmed by the captivating images.

2. Soon, though, I realize that the film is following some sort of pattern and that traces of real world objects from which these images are derived remain; I spend the next few minutes straining to figure the film out.

3. After awhile I tire of this game. Somehow the knowledge that there’s some sort of logic governing the film makes it easier to immerse myself in the images, which I’m once again appreciating for their intrinsic beauty.

This process is similar to what I imagine the path to enlightenment must be like. You can watch Ross’ A Torrent of Helplessness Swept Me Away… (2008?) on YouTube here.

If that’s not enough for you, Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (2008) opens at Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ Harris Theater on Friday, the Oaks Theater will screen On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) (on of my personal favorite James Bond films) on Saturday and Sunday as part of their “Moonlit Matinees” series, and Filmmakers will screen an archival 16mm print of Night of the Living Dead (1968) at their Regent Square Theater on Sunday as part of their “Yearbook 1968″ film series.

Get excited, people!

King Corn (2007) documents a year in the life of college friends Ian Cheney and Curtis Ellis who respond to their discovery that for the first time in American history their generation is at risk of having a shorter lifespan than their parents’ the same way anyone else would: by planting an acre of corn to learn how it’s done and watch what happens to it after it’s harvested and sold.

It make sense, sort of: the film begins with the pair meeting a scientist who analyzes their hair and informs them that they are, essentially, “made of corn”: thanks to government subsidies and technological advances, corn is so cheap and plentiful that it has taken over our food supply. Ostensibly, they didn’t know this before they started filming; in fact, they spend much of the first half of the movie establishing the fact that in the beginning they knew very little about what they were doing in general.

Whether this is just a plot device or an earnest attempt to dramatize their actual ignorance at the outset of this project is immaterial because it’s effective: as they “learn” about corn, so do we. Even when they act unbelievably incredulous (they insist on tasting their corn even though they know that, like most of the corn grown in this country, it has been bred to be processed into animal feed or corn syrup, not eaten raw) it works with the goofy conceit, the transparency of their filmmaking technique, and their charmingly DIY animations (using a toy farm and animals) to reinforce the film’s disarmingly handmade feel and cheerful, good-natured vibe.

Cheney and Ellis never lecture us, and in the rare instances that one of their talking heads does, clever cinematography diffuses the effect (I love the way they situate themselves on either side of us in the shot to the left, as if we’re all in a classroom together). “Regular people,” such as a guy in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant and a cab driver, are given the task of telling us about the most unpleasant side effects of an all corn diet — grain-fed cattle die after a few months and corn syrup-fed people develop problems with obesity and diabetes.

The idea, I think, is that since we’re watching this film, we must already be concerned about what we eat. Unlike many other recent films about similar subjects, King Corn isn’t trying to shock us into thinking about what we put into our bodies; instead, by giving us memorable images that help us conceptualize the issues they address and drawing attention to what they’re doing about it, they give us the opportunity to begin to think through how we want to get involved in improving the quality of America’s food supply.

The film’s strongest image is its last one. It follows a scene in which Cheney and Ellis respectfully (I hope Michael Moore watches and takes notes) confront Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture responsible for the farm subsidies that the film identifies as a source of America’s overabundance of corn. They let him remind us that this current crisis is the result of a too-successful solution to an earlier problem: we haven’t always been able to grow all the food we need.

The movie closes with a long shot of Cheney and Ellis playing Wiffle ball on their acre of farmland, which they’ve bought and allowed to go fallow. Here we have a visual representation of the complexity and immensity of the problem they’ve identified and the difficulty in making a meaningful contribution towards its solution. But it’s uplifting, not depressing: they’ve done something, and they had fun doing it.

They’re telling us to get involved not because we guiltily think we should, but because we want to, because learning about the origin of our food and participating in a dialogue about where it comes from will make us feel better, both as individuals and as a country. This approach to documentary filmmaking is vastly more inspirational and effective than scare tactics; I hope I start to see it more often.

The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh will screen a DVD of King Corn at their Main (Oakland) branch tomorrow (Thursday, August 19) at 7pm.

According to their website the resurgent Oaks Theater in Oakmont will run a double bill of Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears (2007) and the latest Troma travesty Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006) from Friday, August 8 through Thursday, August 21. These will be The Oaks’ second and third significant Pittsburgh theatrical premieres in the same month (Updated 6/28/08: the Warhol will have Poultrygeist on August 1) after Gregg Araki’s Smiley Face (2007), which will screen twice as part of their “Moonlit Matinees” series on August 16 and 17.

Both of Mother of Tears and Poultrygeist have their champions and their detractors. Slant’s Fernando F. Croce says Mother “feels like Dario Argento’s Frenzy, a burst of late-career vigor that allows the horror auteur to address old themes and run them to delirious limits,” but The A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias demurs: “watching the once-great stylist continue his nearly two-decade-long decline with Mother Of Tears isn’t all that amusing.” The opposing camps are even farther apart in the case of Poultrygeist: To the Guardian’s Steven Wells it’s “a wonderfully bold satirical comment on the chemical-industrial food complex that poisons us all” and “the movie Fast Food Nation could have been if it hadn’t sucked,” while to Slant’s Rob Humanick it “doesn’t come even close to compensating for its everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink midnight-movie awfulness.”

Brilliant or terrible, these two films are the stuff of a great Saturday night movie outing. Cheers to The Oaks for bringing them into town!

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), hands down the best film I saw last year, opens at CineMagic’s Manor Theater in Squirrel Hill on Friday! The world Hou depicts in his films looks so much more like the world I see around me than anything else I encounter at the movies that it’s hard for me to be objective about his work. Watching a Hou Hsiao-hsien film is, for me, something like an out-of-body experience. For two hours life exists up on the screen, allowing me to contemplate it from elsewhere. I leave his films relaxed, at peace. I also leave them confused about what exactly I just saw–the ideas and images in Hou’s films are so in tune with my own thoughts and memories that everything gets mixed up. I’ll have to take my notebook along with me once or twice next week.

The critics rave:

“In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental perfs, its creative misunderstandings and its outré syntheses, this is a movie of genius.”
–J. Hoberman

“Part of Hou’s genius is imbuing this material with emotion that is genuine and tender but never sentimental. This is a slice of life that implies so much more than what’s on its surface, something that today’s conventional narrative films are increasingly hard-pressed to even attempt.”
–Glenn Kenny

“It sounds cliched, as does the nature of the film itself, but ‘Flight of the Red Balloon’ is a gem made by a filmmaker who loves life, and knows how to capture its ebb and flow and sweet complication.”
–Michael Phillips

Recommended reading: Daniel Kasman’s “descriptive analysis or review” of the film in fragments.