June 21st 2014. Pick of the Day.
New York City's premiere resource for classic film screenings in the metropolitan area. Offering reviews, recommendations, venues and a host of links keeping classic film and the silver screens alive.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, movie aficionados and aficionados of the moving pictures. I guess that covers nearly all of ya. I bid you a fine and fond welcome to the inaugural day of summer 2014. It seemed for a spell an impossible date reached, especially when I cannibalized the last member of our wagon train. If it's any consolation, Murray, everything tastes a little like you since then. I don't care how that sounds.
But today we greet the SOLSTICE! The longest day of the year! And while, yes, there may exist no end of outdoor frolic and pursuit healthy, I'm here to remind you that valuable expenditure of your time in cramped, dimly lit venues, mostly offering nutritional detriment and company a wee bit too identical to your own, can be readily had for the price of a movie ticket. And your better judgement. But HEY! The hell with better judgement, we got a celluloid obsession to indulge. So deprivation of vitamins A through D, HERE I COME!
Ongoing series today include Original Gangsters at IFC Center, The Works - Kurt Russell at the Nitehawk Cinema, Alec Guinness 100 at Film Forum, See It Big! Sci-Fi at Museum of the Moving Image, Carte Blanche: MK2 at MoMA, and The Italian Connection: Poliziotteschi and Other Italo-Crime Films of the 60's and 70's at Anthology Film Archives. For more, let's go to Murray;
IFC Center
CITY STREETS (1931) Dir; Rouben Mamoulian
Nitehawk Cinema
THE ABYSS (1988) Dir; James Cameron
LIQUID SKY (1982) Dir; Slava Tsukerman
BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986) Dir; John Carpenter
Film Forum
THE LAVENDER HILL MOB (1951) Dir; Charles Crichton
THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT (1951) Dir; Alexander Mackendrick
Mid-Manhattan Library
NIGHT PASSAGE (1957) Dir; James Neilson
Museum of the Moving Image
VIDEODROME (1982) Dir; David Cronenberg
THE TERMINATOR (1984) Dir; James Cameron
MoMA
THE BEEKEEPER (1986) Dir; Theo Angelopoulos
MELO (1986) Dir; Alain Resnais
Anthology Film Archives
CONFESSIONS OF A POLICE CAPTAIN (1971) Dir; Damiano Damiani
GRAND SLAM (1967) Dir; Giuliano Montaldo
RABID DOGS (1974) Dir; Mario Bava
Landmark Sunshine Cinema
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) Dir; Stanley Kubrick
Today's Pick? An abundance of choice tempts, from Moving Image's See It Big! Sci-Fi, to AFA's over-boiling Poliziotteschi, to MoMA's trib to French indy theater chain operator/producer/director/archivist Marin Karmitz (Carte Blanche: MK2). In the face of these impressive offerings, however, a special double-bill screens as part of a wonderful and currently in progress three-week trib to one of the finest thesps to ever grace a movie screen. He not only perfectly embodied such larger-than-life figures as Dickens' Fagin, Pierre Boulle's Colonel Nicholson, and John le Carré's George Smiley, but he also made unassailably believable the role of an aging Jedi master fated to instruct his orphaned friend's son in the ways of the Force. If today's rep film roster was the equivalent of the game of "flipping" baseball cards, Alec Guinness would be the Mickey Mantle.
The 2-fer of Charles Crichton's THE LAVENDER HILL MOB and Alexander Mackendrick's THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT screen as part of Film Forum's excellent Alec Guinness 100 series. Attend, and take your first step into a larger world.
For more info on these and all NYC's classic film screenings in June '14 click on the interactive calendar on the upper right hand side of the page. For the monthly overview and other audio tomfoolery check out the podcast, and follow me on SoundCloud! For reviews of contemporary cinema and my streaming habits (keep it clean!) check out my Letterboxd page. And be sure to follow me on both Facebook, where I provide further info and esoterica on the rep film circuit and star birthdays, and Twitter, where I provide a daily feed for the day's screenings and other blathery. Back tomorrow with a brand new Pick, til then safe, sound, make sure the next knucklehead is too!
-Joe Walsh
P. S. Even though we're coming into the summer months and therefore not often as mindful of the displaced, some of our fellow NY'ers are yet to be made whole since Hurricane Sandy hit nearly two years ago. Check in with the good folks at Occupy Sandy to see if you can't still volunteer/donate to our neighbors in need. Be a mensch.
