August 7th 2013. Pick Of The Day.
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The Film Forum gets the day in classic screenings going with Rene Clair's LE BEAUTE DU DIABLE and D.W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE. Both excellent choices, the former a late-innings fantasy classic from a legend of French filmmaking, the latter a monumentally influential work from perhaps American cinema's most important pioneer. Picked 'em both already, so nyeh, they gotta wait a year. That is my scholarly assessment.
The Film Society's trib to David Bowie's cinematic legacy slowly winds to a close with today's screenings of Nagisa Oshima's MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, David Hemmings' JUST A GIGOLO, and Uli Edel's CHRISTIANE F. Of these three I'd esteem the Oshima the only effort worth your attendance, but I pass them all over in favor of a different hero today, one who remained behind the camera.
Alain Resnais' HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, his meditation on love and memory and the special pain each provides, screens for three days as part of MoMA's ongoing Auteurist History of Film series. Normally I would never pass up an opportunity to catch an obtuse masterpiece of the French Nouvelle Vague when the season of summer still holds sway over NYC, except I don't mean a word of what I just said. Desolee, Alain
Anthology Film Archives screens L'AGE D'OR and LOS OLVIDADOS as a one-day trib to cinematic troublemaker extraordinaire Luis Bunuel. Both important touchstones in the auteur's CV, neither rate as my Pick today. A filmmaker more ensconced in the establishment makes a different sort of trouble tonight, a type perhaps more troubling to the powers that be.
Tonight's outdoor screening of note is Frank Oz's adap of the hit Off-Broadway musical LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, itself based on Roger Corman's classic of basement-budget horror, in wonderfully panoramic Riverside Park. I'm a big fan of all the Oz-man's work, but I gotta pass this up for (GASP!) and indoor screening. A BluRay projection. In a library. In midtown. No, I've checked my meds and everything seems okay.
The New Hollywood of the 70's was, for a brief time, a nuturing environment for filmmakers and storytellers who trafficked in darker, controversial subject matter and heroes of the anti- variety. Classic subversions of bedrock Hollywood genre like Peter Bogdanovich's THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, Francis Ford Coppola's THE GODFATHER, Robert Altman's M.A.S.H. and William Friedkin's THE FRENCH CONNECTION and THE EXORCIST pushed the boundaries and twisted time-honored tropes, but more importantly they brought in big box office reciepts. Sidney Lumet, ex-child actor and ace live TV director who'd transitioned masterfully into feature films with 12 ANGRY MEN, adapted masterfully to each decade he practiced his craft in. Always a fan of the anti-hero, or more precisely granting every character their reasons, he was sought out to replace the director of SERPICO due to creative differences between star Al Pacino and the project's newly unemployed helmer. As Bogie would put it, a beautiful friendship ensued, and they reunited in what some consider the superior collaboration betwen the two, a little something called DOG DAY AFTERNOON. Lumet was well on his way to conquering his third decade in the industry, wholly embracing the more permissive decade of the 70's to push the envelope. How to follow up these twin masterpieces though?
How indeed. Master scenarist Paddy Chayefsky, who himself cut his teeth in the arena of live television, had watched one day while a TV news anchor blew her brains out on the air. The future of mass media hit him like a ton of bricks in that moment, and Sophocles' truism, "How awful is wisdom when is brings no profit to the wise?", had no better invocation. His subsequent screed, inspired by this tragedy in particular and the state of the corporate-controlled planet in general inspired him to produce his masterpiece, a redolent, resonant and uncannily foreboding tale of the overtaking of what remains of the collective soul by the powers that be and their electronic devices. Yes it's perhaps annoyingly rote to comment on the prescience this film possessed WAY back in 1976, but it's no less true. Chayefsky saw his critique fully realized, and won a second Oscar in the process, and Lumet gave every character their reasons, even though he probably agreed with none of them. Remarkable, unequivocal, and we sadly and most likely will never look upon its like again. I believe these factors make it worth your while to brave the library cops and communally view a masterpiece.
Sidney Lumet's NETWORK is presented at the Mid-Manhattan Library as part of their series 1970's: NYC on Film. I don't care how mad you might be, SHHH!!!
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