June 8th 2013. Pick Of the Day.
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The Nitehawk Cinema in bustling metropolitan B-Burg offers up vastly different versions of Sci-Fi filmmaking at opposite ends of the little hand today. Brunch brings a screening of Mel Brooks' STAR WARS lampoon SPACEBALLS, while midnight offers Stanley Kubrick's pensive meditation 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. I'm gonna let these two FX-driven exercises cancel each other out in favor of a double bill perhaps more innovative and certainly more fun. Sorry, Mel & Stan. Today's all about Ray.
Yasojiro Ozu's LATE SPRING screens as part of the Film Forum's exhaustive trib to the late great. The tale of a woman's happy vocation as doting daughter suddenly threatened by her father's desire to remarry is quintessential Ozu, who found his greatest success in mining the drama from everyday family life. I picked the celluloid sensei yesterday, so I must pass in favor of a depiction of familial unrest pretty far removed from Ozu's world view.
MOMA's trib to the great journeyman/auteur/takeyerpick Allan Dwan is just geting started, today offering four selections from the fillmmaker's epic CV; MAN TO MAN concerns a father's efforts to keep his sins from damning his son's name, THE HALF -BREED and A MODERN MUSKETEER show the filmmaker helping to shape star Douglas Fairbanks' future swashbuckler persona, and CHANCES follows Doug Fairbanks Junior as he navigates the frontlines of WW I and a romantic triangle in the same fell swoop. Ya could do worse than kill the whole blustery day up at Abby Rockefeller's indulgence, and soon I shall implore you to do so, but not today, when another master and his illustrious career is granted a too short trib. Read on.
The soon-to-be-no-more 92YTribeca, and there's not a single smile to be found resulting from that unhappy reality, faces its impending doom with a screening of JAWS: THE REVENGE, which was actually directed by the guy who gave us WHITE LIGHTNING and THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123. Ya never can tell. I'd implore you to catch a screening at this wonderful venue before it shuts down for good, but I've done so in the past repeatedly and if you haven't taken my advice before then tough! I simply will not choose against a superior form of creature feature this eve.
The midnight roundup in our film obsessed environs include the aforementioned Kubrick, along with screenings of Terry Gilliam's JABBERWOCKY and Ridley Scott's ALIEN, both at IFC Center. Really though, and these men would all agree, there is no choosing against my Pick today when it comes to the realm of fantasy filmmaking and the pioneering effects breakthroughs achieved by one of filmdom's most beloved behind-the-camera figures. So let's just give it up for Ray Harryhausen everybody. We miss him dearly already.
As has been the case for untold millions of Cinegeeks across the decades, Ray Harryhausen first fell in love with the movies through a little romantic fable known as KING KONG. Unlike those other untold millions, he decided to express his love for the 8th Wonder of the World by trying to recreate him. In the course of his endeavors he struck up a relationship with KONG's creator, Willis OBrien, who urged Harryhausen to study sculpture and anatomy to better his craft. Around this same time RH began what would become a lifelong friendship with fellow dreamers Ray Bradbury and Forret J. Ackerman, the latter of whom would actually coin the term "Sci-Fi". And you thought the X-MEN was improbable...
During WW II he worked for Frank Capra is several menial film capacities, but was able to salvage otherwise dispensible film stock for his postwar experiments, which became a series of fairy tale-based shorts, as well as a test reel for an unrealized adap of H. G. Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS. Soon after that he was hired by O'Brien as an assistant on MIGHTY JOE YOUNG, which went on to win the 1949 Oscar for Achievement in Special Effects. Soon afterwards he flew solo as Effects Supervisor on buddy Ray Bradbury's THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS. A box office smash. Ray Harryhausen was on his way to stardom, as very soon his name on the poster became prime selling point. BEAST gave him his first opportunity to try out his particular system, where pre-filmed foreground action would be later integrated with his stop-motion background action and the whole thing would come together in the cinemas as a lovingly wrapped gift box I thank ye. He would later call this process Dynamation, and it would serve him well in features such as THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS and IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA, all overseen by producing partner Charles H. Schneer. No one's ever truly replicated the magic Harryhausen created over the course of his 30-plus year career, though they've tried god love 'em, which makes his passing last month all the more disheartening. The man I swore would never leave us did just that. Which just makes today's screenings that much more unmissable, at least until a full week- or month-long retrospective is planned somewhere in our film-obsessed city. Until then I can only be wholly grateful to a venue just outside our borders, a restored movie palace that surely booked Harryhausen's films when they were first-run features, for affording the great man a night unto himself, offering up what is pretty much acknowledged as his crowning achievement. You tell me if there's a better swordfight on film than Todd Armstrong had with a band of rowdy skeletons...
The Landmark Jersey Loews proudly presents Ray Harryhausen's JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, preceded by his equally awesome 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH, as a salute to the grand old man of movie magic. Thank you Mr. H, and I can only say that Dynamation can only be that much less dynamic wthout you in the world.
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Be safe and sound and make sure the next guy is too, Stockahz! Follow the Twitter and Facbook accounts to see my Picks til I return next Wednesday! In the meantime lemme know if summer decides to arrive. Excelsior!
-Joe Walsh
