June 1st 2013! Pick Of The Day!

Ted Kotcheff's THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ featured rising star Richard Dreyfuss in his first lead, scheming, schlepping and kvetching in pursuit of his dream; lakefront property. The eclectic filmmaker had already directed an earlier TV production of ex-roommate Mordecai Richler's novella, but he didn't have his ultimate Duddy til he cast the future Matt Hooper, and some say the actor has never been better than these two hours. Screens for a week at the Film Forum. Today, though, not my Pick. Oy.

Kaneto Shindo's jidaigeki horror classic ONIBABA screens as part of the Anthology Film Archives' excellent series dedicated to The Middle Ages on Film. Shindo's creepfest concerns masks both figurative and literal, and proves the age old maxim that we wind up with the face we deserve. Delivers the shivers, but not my Pick.

Midnight unspoolings about our film-centric burg include Jack Smight's AIRPORT 1975 at the Nitehawk Cinema in beautiful downtown B-Burg, and Alejandro Jodorowsky's EL TOPO at IFC Center. Both equally batshit, if for different reasons. Neither win today's Pick, as three titanic templates of the medium unspool today at MOMA as tribute payed to a very special film patron indeed, who is feted by the museum with a mini-fest that celebrates her primarily as a movie fan, albeit one who just happened to have a few million bucks lying around.

Celeste Bartos was one of the cinema's greatest philanthropists. An active supporter of the Film Forum, Anthology Film Archives and Museum of the Moving Image, she also served on the Board of Trustees at the Museum of Modern Art for 40-plus years. Until the mid-90's MOMA's impressive collection of celluloid both flammable and otherwise resided in a Jersey warehouse not merely ill-equipped to store futher acquistions but failing the prints they currently housed. Mary Lea Bandy, then director of Department of Film at MOMA, approached Bartos with the problem. The solution? The Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center in Hamlin, PA, where the museum's collection is currently stored, restored and preserved under state of the art conditions straight outta Marty Scorsese's wet dreams. If you've ever been privy to a pristine 35mm screening of a classic in MOMA's theater spaces, and I'm betting you have if you're reading this site, this is the checkbook and the woman attached you should shower your Cinegeek gratitude with. She left us last January at the too-young age of 99. Being the popcorn munching knucklehead I am, I had no idea who Celeste was until I heard about this trib, so I'm making up for lost time by spreading the word about her and the film series screening in her honor.

The only difficult question is this; how do I choose between Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack's KING KONG, Howard Hawks' BRINGING UP BABY and Orson Welles' CITIZEN KANE?

Easy. I go with Hawks. Like there was any doubt?

Hawks didn't single-handedly invent the Screwball Comedy, but he pretty much created its boilerplate template with this Cary Grant/Katherine Hepburn/Leopard farce where Grant and Leopard aren't the most dangerous thing in the film on the loose. Intellectuals behaving idiotically, upper class exhibiting crass character, highbrow unsettled by lowbrow, slapstick, identity confusion, SEXUAL identity confusion, and a climax that sees the whole intricate structure go to pieces, whch may just be filmdom's perfect enduring metaphor for falling in love, I pray you tell me; what does this film lack?

Howard Hawks' BRINGING UP BABY screens today at 5:30pm at MOMA as part of the tribute to Celeste Bartos. I'd like to think this is her Pick today too.

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