January 23rd 2013. Pick Of the Day.
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My advice today is stay indoors. Order in some hot tomato soup and turkey meatloaf. Crawl up next to the fireplace and indulge your DVD collection or Turner Classic Movies for your classic film fix. If you don't have a deep DVD collection or TCM perhaps AMC or FX or TNT will suffice. If you don't have a fireplace to crawl up beside then make one, MAKE ONE I SAID!!!!
Sorry, single digit degree weather does things to me. Impromptu fireplaces are a bad idea I'm told. So is indoor grilling. Spring, trust me, is right around the corner, my fellow stir crazy coldophobes, so we just gotta brave this crap until warmer days and baseball return. Should you choose to venture forth into our frozen gotham in search of classic film screenings this frigid day you'll find a few damn good reasons to do so.
MOMA's Auteurist History of Film series begins its usual glorious three-day run, this week offering a Douglas Sirk melodrama that reunited his WRITTEN ON THE WIND cast for a melodramatic adap of a William Faulkner novel. THE TARNISHED ANGELS follows the romantic triangle between Robert Stack's ex-WWI flying ace, his wife and partner in their travelling air show Dorothy Malone, and the reporter who becomes intrigued by their lifestyle and VERY intrigued by Ms. Malone in particular, one Rock Hudson. It all plays out with Sirk's custom Technicolor postwar angst. Proceedings salacious I'm sure, but not today's Pick.
Luis Bunuel's THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY unspools at IFC Center as part of their new series The Modern School Of Film. I could summarize, but who has done so and lived to tell the tale? This is Bunuel. The man just loved to eviscerate complacent middle class culture or the lack thereof, conventional narrative be damned. Would be my Pick today, but an even more subverisve underground film screens this day. Or so I'm led to believe. I partially choose My Pick today due to its rep notorious and the fact that I have yet to witness concrete proof of this. Plus the guy's responsibe for Tony Stark. The film iteration anyway. Read on...
There is a reason the guy who plays IRON MAN has the apellation Junior anchoring his name. Well, yeah, it's because his dad named him after himself. What I'm implying is his father had a career in film before he co-created one of our greatest living actors. At one point the most celebrated Robert Downey was an absurdist blackly comic underground filmmaker who some folks consider important enough still to borrow not merely his style but the names of characters from his films for their own (yer ears burnin', P. T.?). The great postwar American experimental/underground film movement had many authors, most of which have been and continue to be on dislplay in Film Forum's New Yawk New Wave series. Downey earned a special place in this scene back in the day, invoking spare art house aesthetic, Dadaist style and Mad magazine style satire to form his own particular brand of cinematic prank, one that holds up to this day. Just ask Kevin Smith.
Early success came with his fourth feature, CHAFED ELBOWS, a box office hit that utilized mixed photographic media, on display today at the Forum. Indie and underground immortality, however, resided in his 6th film. The tale of a black American occupying an insignificant position on the board of a powerful Madison Avenue ad agency who finds himself suddenly promoted to chairman proved groundbreaking, controversial, and commercially successful. Perhaps not as widely credited as EASY RIDER with prompting the New Hollywood of the 70's its influence was nonetheless powerful, and several 70's auteurs have Downey to thank for their CV, though they seemingly could never quite replicate the man's creative sensibilities. Just ask one of his unsuccessful imitators, one Robert Altman. Go ahead, I'll wait.
The great Robert Downey Sr.'s PUTNEY SWOPE screens all day today at the Film Forum, and the great man himself will be in attendance for the 6:30pm screening of CHAFED ELBOWS and the 7:50pm screening of SWOPE. This is really something not to be missed. Especially if it means you won't burn your apartment to the ground building an impromptu fireplace.
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Wear gloves! And a scarf! Don't make me worry about you sons of bitches! New Pick up tomorrow! Excelsior, Suckahz!
-Joe Walsh
