August 10th 2013. Pick Of The Day.

The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria kicks off the day in rep film screenings with Francis Ford Coppola's studio debut YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW and acting great Ossie Davis' directorial debut COTTON COMES TO HARLEM. Coppola's film proved a forerunner of later 60's counterculture film like THE GRADUTATE and EASY RIDER, while Davis' adap of the classic Chester Himes crime novel served as touchstone for the 70's blaxploitation genre. Both screen as part of the museum's series Fun City; New York in the Movies 1967-75. Neither snag my Pick.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music's Cinematek presents Charlie Chaplin's MODERN TIMES as part of their weekend series Chaplin in 35mm. Here the Little Tramp actually suffers a nervous breakdown trying to co-exist and keep pace with the 20th century's advancing tech, best exemplified by the iconic sequence that finds our hero body surfing the massive twirling cogs that run his place of employment. ALWAYS hard to choose against the master, but a friendlier take on technology, albeit not an earthly one, earns top marks this day.

D. W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE, an even bolder vision than his groundbreaking BIRTH OF A NATION that also served as quasi-mea culpa for the earlier film, enjoys a short reprieve at Film Forum and now screens through Tuesday August 20th. Chose it already, so another epic ode to peaceful co-existence gets the nod today.

The Film Society's excellent retrospective Fasten Your Seatbelts (Part 2): 20th Century Fox offers up Richard Fleischer's THE BOSTON STRANGLER, which finds Tony Curtis playing way against type as the titular killer, Robert Altman's 3 WOMEN yeah I got nothin', and Mark Robsons' adap of Jacqueline Susann's then-scandalous VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. Special pricing should ya wanna fill a seat through all three. I skip all three, however, as my Pick. Misongyny's never been my thing.

Anthology Film Archives counters with their own set of series today. Cine-Simenon, dedicated to screen adaps of the works of novelist George Simenon, presensts Bertrand Tavernier's THE CLOCKMAKER, in which the titular timepiece tinkerer wrestles with the realization that his son is a killer, and Julien Duvivier's A MAN"S NECK, one of the first screen incarnations of Simenon's famed detective Jules Maigret. AFA also offers two works from the great Carl Theodore Dreyer, THE PARSON'S WIDOW and VAMPYR. If it's Bring Your Own Mattress Day* again you get to laze in springloaded comfort through all four flicks, yet still I eschew these fine works for another, more buoyant work of the cinema. Read on. (*Just in case, there ain't no friggin' Bring Your Own Mattress Day. Idiot.)

Sam Raimi's EVIL DEAD 2 concludes for the day Film Forum's month-long Son of Summer Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror fest. Essentially a remake of the precursory flick, though one having ingested an enormous amount of Bath Salts in the interim, Raimi pretty much invented slapstick horror with this wildly inventive work of low budget, kinetically kinographed shriek. Pains me to takes sides against it, but I favor a different genre filmmaker, an even more important contributor to the elevation of B-Movie to Blockbuster. We're almost there.

Midnight madness in our movie-myopic metropolis includes Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE and John Carpenter's DARK STAR at the Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, and Nobuhiko Obayashi's HAUSU at IFC Center. Cool stuff to be sure, but let's free ourselves of all earthly baggage this day and board the Mothership, shall we?

Steven Spielberg had witnessed a meteor shower as a child that remained significant into his adulthood for at least two reasons; its visceral power proved indelible to the youngster's furiously firing creative synapses, and it was among the most cherished moments shared with his father, as the relationship would complicate after his parents would divorce during his already difficult teen years. Thus would the idea of escaping one's adulthood responsibilities forever be linked in the future auteur's mind with the concept of otherworldly visitation.

Alright, maybe that's a stretch, but it sounds good, don't it?

Spielberg did in fact make a film inspired by this meteor shower while still in his teens, a parentally financed indulgence titled FIRELIGHT, that displayed the adolescent's creativity and, perhaps, volatility, as the aliens in this first run are most acrimonious indeed. Years later after film school and TV work he made his feature directorial debut, THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS, whose woeful box-office sent him scrambling for his next gig. ANY gig. That next job of work was a little seasonal hit called JAWS, and the fledgling filmmaker who'd steered that production through, pardon me, rough waters now found himself the all-time box office champeen. It may not have struck him at that time how the biz model itself would restructure around this seismic game-changer, but what did occur to him was he now had the opportunity to bring his 16mm alien invasion movie to the big screen. A minor detail had changed in the meantime, though, between wide-eyed gazing at the stars with his pop and post-Quint success. That detail would be Paul Schrader.

During post-production on SUGARLAND Spielberg began a development deal with Columbia Pictures, and one of the projects that he pursued was the FIRELIGHT upgrade. Paul Schrader hadn't yet struck paydirt with TAXI DRIVER and THE YAKUZA, so his services were still very much available. There is much debate to this day over how much material he provided for the final shooting script, as some deride his contributions and others claim Spielberg had little more than a series of visuals he badly needed a screenwriter to tie together, and the ultimate claiming of sole screenwriting credit was nothing more than a crass grab at the auteur status friends and colleagues like Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma enjoyed. What's undenied in all this mishegoss is this; Schrader provided the idea of a zealous UFO denier who is literaly burned by the discovery of that which he's spent his life debunking, an updating of the Biblical tale of Saul on the road to Damascus. One can easliy imagine Spielberg grafting a stunted adolescence onto this newly-devout true believer, and allowing his whisking away from all Earthly duress into the arms of the wonderous universe. The fact is though while we may never know who ultimately provided what to the final work, we do know the true father of this masterpiece was a wondrous moment a teenager spent with his true father, and all the commensurate gleam these memories contain either onscreen or off never diminish with time. They only grow brighter.

Steven Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND screens all day as part of Film Forum's comprehensive Son Of Summer Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror fest. If you're seeing this for the first time on the big screen, I envy you.

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Back next week with a new set of Picks! Keep updated by following the Twitter feed and Facebook page! And somebody SLOW AUGUST DOWN!

-Joe Walsh

joew@nitratestock.net