August 16th 2013. Pick Of the Day.

Film Forum gets the day in rep screening begun with its Son Of Summer Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror series. The Kaiju classic MOTHRA, a cautionary tale warning of the potential perils faced whence a pair of Barbie doll-sized birdcaged chicks kick off a duet, celebrates the gleeful destruction of major Japanese cities all day today. A seminal work of the man-in-suit edifice-carnage genre, but it did boast a very important antecedent. We'll come to that shortly.
Also at the Forum D.W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE continues to impress in its new DCP incarnation. Still doesn't excuse the blatant racism of BIRTH OF A NATION, but it's the effort that counts methinks.
Michelangelo Antonioni's L'AVVENTURA, the filmmaker's groundbreaking work that firmly ensconced his rep as one of the brave new voices of European cinema, screens its last this day as part of MoMA's ongoing Auteurist History of Film series. Me and Monica Vitti been seeing a little too much of each other lately, so I choose to spend some time away from the minx Italiana. Perdonami.
The Film Society's trib to the antics of one Werner Herzog, batshit auteur extraordinaire, begins with AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD, his epic screed on greed, obsession and madness, and closes out the evening with his earlier and more intimate character study THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER. Any opportunity to catch the Teutonic Teddy Bear's work on the big screen should not be taken lightly, but an even bigger cinematic footprint takes my Pick today. Because even Herzog can't melt your face with his breath. At least...I'm pretty sure he can't. Hey let's just forget I said that to begin with okay? And we're walking, and we're walking...
Gordon Parks Jr. follows his father's massively succesful SHAFT with SUPERFLY, an equally important entry to the 70's blaxploitation genre. Ron O'Neal essays the titular drug kingpin badass, while Curtis Mayfield provides the iconic soundtrack. Screens at Museum of the Moving Image as part of their Fun City; New York in the Movies 1967-75 series. A different sort of big city blight nudges the inner city godfather out of contention today. No it's not a race thing, how can that be when he's competing against a completely different species?
The Russ Meyer love expands significantly at Anthology Film Archives tonight, as their trib to the master of the Nudie Cuties offers what many consider his signature work, the masterpiece of mammary malevolence FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! Also screening tonight as part of the series is the perhaps more luridly titled Meyer work MUDHONEY. Russ Meyer focused on big subjects, to put it mannerly, in his films, but nothing quite on the scale of what Ishiro Honda brought to audiences worldwide. Cheap gag, perhaps, but it's what I brought.
Tim Burton's BEETLEJUICE is tonight's outdoor screening of note over at Pier 46 on the Hudson River. Even he would abdicate his candidacy for today's Pick once he considered the particular giant who roars his ugly head again this eve, whose shoulders the now utterly useless hack once stood upon for his own glory. Burton sucks. Let's move on.
The Rubin Museum's excellent Cabaret Cinema series presents tonight Jean Negulesco's JOHNNY BELINDA, which offered Jane Wyman one of her signature roles and resulted in an Oscar win for her tremendous perf. As always the price of a glass of booze rewards you with a ticket to the museum's swank screening space. Great flick, but I'm going with the original Kaiju daddy tonight. Wyman, having been married once upon a time to Ronald Reagan, would understand I'm sure.
Midnight shenanigans about our fair city include Meir Zarchi's original I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE at the Nitehawk Cinema in Billy-burg, and Irwin Allen's magnum disaster opus THE SWARM at Manhattan's own IFC Center. Besting both the revenge motif of the former and the eco-horror of the latter, my Pick today was not merely a cash-in on 50's postwar paranoia, but an indictment of the indelibly horrifying marks that war left not merely on Japan but the entire world and its posterity. Or maybe it was just about a guy in a big sweaty lizard suit crushing a tiny model city. Either way, I believe, Jung would've been amused.
The one that started it all, Ishiro Honda's original 1954 GODZILLA, screens today at Film Forum as part of their Son of Summer Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror series. KONG might've terrorized a metropolis first, and Irwin Allen may have perfected citywide destruction in 70mm, but I maintain no one ever wanted to dress up as either and stomp their way across a major urban metropolis. That's what makes a movie star.
 
Follow me on Twitter @NitrateStock.
Like the page at Facebook.com/NitrateStock.
The folks over at Occupy Sandy could still use your donation/volunteering help. Some NY'ers still need to be made whole.
Be safe and sound and make sure the next guy/gal is too. Back tomorrow with this week's final Pick. I have it on good authority that August might well be arriving sometime in the middle of September. Fingers crossed.
 
-Joe Walsh
joew@nitratestock.net