July 5th 2013. Pick Of The Day.

Everybody enjoy their 4th? Stomachs stuffed, bikinis stuffed, lobsters stuffed? Grills managed expertly, fireworks observed with the requisite amount of awe, Nathan's hot dog eating contestant vomit through his nose? All in all a pleasant celebration of our great nation's 237th?

Great! Same here! Now let's get back to the blessed pursuit of classic film screenings in the 5 boroughs! And today's LOADED with Cinegeek goodness!

MoMA's exhaustive trib to a genuine Hollywood pioneer, Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios, breathes still but not for long at Abby Rockefeller's indulgence. Today you may avail yourself of the man's CV with screenings of MOST DANGEROUS MAN ALIVE and TENNESSEE'S PARTNER, the former the filmmaker's last, a low-budget atomic age thriller, and the latter a John Payne-Ronald Reagan Western based on a Bret Harte short story. Noble goals for the classic film lover this balmy July day, but not my Pick.

BAM shows off its pristine renovation of a bona fide movie palace, the now fully state-of-the-art Harvey Theater, with a couple of weeks' worth of Hollywood Epics. Today Stanley Kubrick's unequivocal masterpiece 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY unspools in the grand theater, and continues to confound and amaze with all the beauty and potency it displayed whence first released in 1968. Touch to pick against Stanley K., but another, smaller-scaled odyssey screens today, one that strives to define the human condition in an entirely different yet no less profound manner. Read on, MacDuff...

Astoria's Museum of the Moving Image gives BAM a run for its money with its own See It Big! series, which today brings us Sight and Sounds' once and fututre king CITIZEN KANE. No trespassing, indeed.

Anthology Film Archives gets particularly busy this weekend with a pair of programs, one dedicated to a poet of the cinema and the other to the pursuit of the perfect wave. You decide which is which. Tonight Jean Cocteau's BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and THE BLOOD OF A POET, the latter of which kicked off his Orphic Trilogy which also screens in full this weekend, sits comfortably side-by-side with the venue's Surfin' AFA series, of which John Milius' ode to Malibu beach bumdom BIG WEDNESDAY is the film of note. AFA both clings to tradition and invites some new sunlight into its halls. A good sign, methinks, but today a claustrophobic rain-drenched drama takes my Pick this early July day. I'd admit how masochistic this was if the film in question wasn't one of the greatest championings of the human spirit versus the deadening forces of bureaucracy that film had to offer. And that sorta makes it a sunny Pick today, no? No? Well screw ya, it's still my Pick. Keep going...

Videology in Brooklyn offers a BluRay projection of Katherine Bigelow's Vampire masterpiece NEAR DARK. I know it's a glorified house party but the popcorn's terrific and it IS a communal viewing of a bona fide classic. K-Bigz didn't top this slice of awesome til 2009's Best Pic winner THE HURT LOCKER. The lady always tempts, but today I side with a different film hero.

The Rubin Museum presents John Huston's Oscar-winning and wildly influential THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE as part of their ongoing Cabaret Cinema series. While it is true we still don't need no stinkin' badges, we do indeed need to purchase a cocktail as admission to the museum's screening lounge. Well worth it, but a different kind of treasure takes my Pick today. Forgive me, Buddhists.

Midnight fare about our movie loving burg includes Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL at IFC Center, Steven Spielberg's INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF YEAH WHATEVER WHO GIVES A GOOD GODDAM at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema, and the early 80's wank classic HARDBODIES at the Nitehawk Cinema. So basically it's a masterpiece versus a damn shame and awesome B-Burg root beer and tater tots. My choice here would be clear would not a fave from a personal film hero be screening today. And I'm not tossing the term "hero" about casually. Sidney Lumet is one of the reasons I came to love film in the first place. He's also one of the reasons I still do.

Mah boy Sid was born to actor parents and began his career as a child performer in the Yiddish theater. A promising career on-stage was cut short by WW2 service, where he served in the signal corps and developed his strong organizational skills. Once discharged at war's end he first attempted to resume his acting career but soon found his talents lay behind the curtain. Television soon came a-callin' as the new medium attempted to compete with Hollywood, and as it was mostly based in NYC it cherry-picked the top talent from the theater world. Lumet found employment as a teleplay director for Playhouse 90, Kraft Television Theater and Studio One, quickly gaining a reputation for speed, efficiency and quality. Reginald Rose, a teleplay writer whose dramatization of his experience serving on jury duty resulted in a resounding hit for CBS's Studio One, was approached about the film rights by none other than screen icon Henry Fonda, who also sought to serve as producer for this passion project. Both men pitched the project to Lumet, offering the harried TV director his feature film debut. The acceptance of this gig by Lumet represents not merely one of the most assured and still-enthralling debuts in film history but the kicking-off of one of the the great directorial careers in the medium's history. 50 years and 40 films. And tally up how many of those films were good, great, and flat-out masterpieces. It all began with one film, and it screens for a week in our film-crazed metropolis. There are few directors that I love as much as Lumet, and I still miss ya Sid.

Sidney Lumet's 12 ANGRY MEN screens for a week in a spit-shined new DCP presentation at Film Forum. If you've never seen this, one of the greatest feature debuts of all time, what the hell's wrong with you? If you've never seen this screened large, and I count myself, you now have zero excuse. Try to beat actual jury duty by all means, but don't miss this.

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Be safe and sound and make sure the next knucklehead is too! Back tomorrow with this week's final Pick! Two words, Stockahz! Hydrate and sunscreen! A third word? Zzzzzzzzzzzz

-Joe Walsh

joew@nitratestock.net