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92YTribeca Film Series: Not Coming to a Theater Near You

92YTribeca Film Series: Not Coming to a Theater Near You

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Feature by: Leo Goldsmith

Posted on: 14 March 2010

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92YTribeca.org

NotComing.com’s partnership with 92YTribeca, a monthly film series spotlighting older, often unpopular, and sometimes unknown films we all love, continues this spring. Editors Rumsey Taylor, Leo Goldsmith and Jenny Jediny will introduce their selections of arty, exotic, or otherwise hard-to-see specimens from the world of cinema.

On Saturday, March 20 at 7pm, writer/director Tom Schiller will appear in person to present his exceptionally offbeat film, Nothing Lasts Forever, starring Zach Galligan, Lauren Tom, and Bill Murray. Future screenings include Douglas Sirk’s suburban melodrama There’s Always Tomorrow, starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, on April 17. More information may be found at 92YTribeca.org or our Facebook event page.


Saturday, November 20, 7:30pm

Zazie dans le métro poster Ticket information

Zazie dans le métro

When a transportation strike ruins her stay with Uncle Gabriel (Philippe Noiret), the impish gamine Zazie (Catherine Demongeot) runs amok amidst the avenues and arcades of Paris, evading policemen, perverts and parental figures while wreaking havoc and talking like a sailor. Characteristically changing gears after the stylish film noir Elevator to the Gallows and the sensuous The Lovers, director Louis Malle enlisted famed photographer and filmmaker William Klein as an artistic consultant to better visualize the verbal pirouettes of Raymond Queneau’s novel. Ebullient and infectious, Zazie dans le métro abounds with cinematic acrobatics—fast and slow motion, animation, jumpcuts and an endless array of aural and visual gags. The result is, for Malle, a characteristically chameleonic work, set in an oneiric Parisian cityscape that’s at once mythically familiar and teasingly abstract.

Director: Louis Malle. 89 min. 1960. 35mm.


To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org or our Facebook event page


Saturday, October 30, 7pm

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave poster Ticket information

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave

Within the multitude of images that comprise the horror genre, that of Count Dracula – his hair immaculately kempt, contrasting sharply against his pale white face – is among the least variable. And by some measure, this face is best rendered by Christopher Lee, whose pouty mouth seems poised to open suddenly and in formidable aperture. By 1970 Lee had assumed the role of the Count in three instances, all for Hammer Films: Dracula, in 1958, Prince of Darkness, 1966 and Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, in 1968. The last of these is among Hammer’s most renowned Dracula films, but it is important to note the film’s deviations: it is the first helmed by Freddie Francis, following Terence Fischer’s direction of the prior Hammer Dracula films, and it was the first to be filmed at Elstree Studios, in London, as a means of diminishing production costs. (Francis was previously the cinematographer of the fine British horror film The Innocents and later on several films for David Lynch.) The result is considerably darker, more livid and ambiguous than the previous Hammer Dracula films, ably cementing Lee’s status as a fundamental icon of the horror genre.

This screening will be preceded by a sampling of trailers from other Hammer horror films.

Director: Freddie Francis. 92 min. 1968. 35mm.

Full Review


To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org or our Facebook event page


Saturday, September 11, 7pm/8:30pm

James Benning poster Ticket information

Two films by James Benning

In anticipation of the New York premiere of his new film Ruhr at the NYFF’s Views from the Avant-Garde, we present two varied older works by acclaimed experimental documentary filmmaker James Benning.


American Dreams: Three chronologies hypnotically overlap in James Benning’s American Dreams: the span of champion home-run hitter Hank Aaron’s major league career, summarized through Benning’s own collection of baseball cards and Aaron memorabilia; American politics and pop culture that parallel Aaron’s rise to fame, heard through excerpts of newscasts, political speeches and top 40 hits; and finally, the scrolling text sourcing the 1972 diaries of Arthur Bremer, would-be political assassin (and key inspiration for Travis Bickle). While Benning has been more recently acclaimed for his “landscape” films (13 Lakes, RR, the forthcoming Ruhr), American Dreams offers a dark exploration of a different topography: the landscape of the mind and the scattered remnants of American ideals.

Director: James Benning. 56 min. 1983. 16mm.


Deseret: Completed a year before the 1996 centennial of Utah’s statehood – and titled after the Mormons’ original, rejected name for the state – James Benning’s Deseret explores the state through fragments of history and topography.

As it impassively records Utah’s majestic landscapes (mountains, deserts and red rock country) and quiet man-made constructions (churches, highways and fast-food restaurants), ninety-three articles from the New York Times from 1852 to 1992 are excerpted in voiceover, documenting Mormon codes, the construction of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, violence between Mormons, Indians, the federal government and government-sanctioned toxic waste dumping. Through this collage of texts and images, Benning creates an expansive portrait in which, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has it, “the viewer is… compelled to construct a Utah and a history of his or her own – a makeshift novel or at least fragments of such a novel – in which all these elements belong.”


To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org or our Facebook event page


Saturday, August 21, 7pm

Dishonored poster Shanghai Express poster Ticket information

Josef von Sternberg double feature

Dishonored: “A woman who knows how to deal with men.” 1915 and amid the dust of the collapsing Austrian Empire the secret service deploys Agent X27 to seduce and spy on the Russians. von Sternberg’s sensual excess is on full display in Dishonored, from set pieces (a glorious masked ball) to star Marlene Dietrich’s performance as the prostitute turned government agent. While expectedly sultry as X27 (von Sternberg’s muse is outfitted throughout in feathers, silk and a skintight, shimming black bodysuit), Dietrich’s unabashed defiance of societal convention makes this, her third collaboration with the director, most memorable.

Director: Josef von Sternberg. 91 min. 1931. 35mm.


Shanghai Express: The lurid and immaculately photographed orientalist fantasy of von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express finds Dietrich at her most iconic and most beautifully costumed, too, ever peering through smoke, veils, feathers and expressionistic chiaroscuro. Riding the titular locomotive coursing through a politically volatile China, Dietrich’s coasting seductress subverts all forms of masculine hypocrisy and violence along the way (with the help of a formidable foil in Anna May Wong). Amid the chaos of a land “where time and life have no value,” Dietrich still finds time to puncture the stodgy bitterness of ex-lover Clive Brooks with an insouciant flick of the hat brim and the immortal, emasculating line, “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily!”

Director: Josef von Sternberg. 80 min. 1932. 35mm.


To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org or our Facebook event page


Saturday, July 17, 7:30pm

Lost Highway Ticket information

Lost Highway

David Lynch’s career is so replete with instances of surreal horror and obsession that it may not be singularly iconified by any image. Henry’s deformed child in Eraserhead, an ominous severed ear in Blue Velvet—these examples are less emblematic of Lynch’s career than, simply, his last name, so precise in verbalizing the experience of seeing one of his films for the first time. By this measure, no Lynch film is as outright antagonistic as Lost Highway. It possesses many additions to Lynch’s already venerable canon of images: Robert Blake’s wraithlike Mystery Man; Marilyn Manson’s snuff footage; and finally, a dark highway illuminated only by the headlights of a speeding car. Some thirteen years after its release – and absent a satisfactory North American release on DVDLost Highway is just beginning to receive the sort of appraisal that has greeted Lynch’s more contemporary output; nonetheless, it’s as idiosyncratic and difficult a film as he’s made, and undoubtedly his scariest.

Director: David Lynch. 135 min. 1997. 35mm.


To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org or our Facebook event page


Saturday, June 26, 7:30pm

Crime Wave Ticket information

Crime Wave

A pastiche of literary crime fiction, picket fence suburbia and surrealism, John Paizs’ 1985 Crime Wave is a consistently inventive, playful treatise on the toils of the creative process. (It’s also a stalwart example of Winnipeg cinema, a stylistic cousin to the work of Paizs’ good friend, Guy Maddin.) The film concerns Steven, an aspiring young screenwriter who is incapable of sustaining inspiration long enough to complete the middle of a story. He has, however, penned numerous beginnings and endings, many of which are re-enacted as the film proceeds—these interstitial episodes alone are so outlandish that they would make for roughly a dozen movies. Because Steven is played by Paizs himself, Crime Wave amounts to an endearing and honest meta-film. As Steven labors over his typewriter late into the night and an enigmatic street lamp outside his window summons a variety of ideas, we watch with great anticipation for another of his bizarre stories and to see if he’ll ever actually finish one.

Director: John Paizs. 80 min. 1985. 16mm.


John Paizs will appear in person to introduce Crime Wave as well as his 1981 short film Springtime in Greenland.

To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org or our Facebook event page


Saturday, May 22, 7pm

Minnie And Moskowitz Ticket information

Minnie And Moskowitz

Pioneering independent filmmaker John Cassavetes takes on sunny Los Angeles in Minnie and Moskowitz, along with his usual cinematic partners in crime: Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel, Tim Carey, Val Avery and family matriarchs Katherine Cassavetes and Lady Rowlands. Minnie Moore is a mousy museum employee whose bad luck with men reaches new heights when she encounters Seymour Moskowitz, a free-spirited parking attendant and while they’re not a match made in heaven, they’re certainly made for each other. With dating misadventures filled with moments of mayhem and tender romance, hot dogs and fistfights and singing and dancing, Minnie and Moskowitz channels the screwball ethos of 1930s Hollywood with Cassavetes’ nonconformist spirit. Vincent Canby called it Cassavetes’ “most ambitious film [and] also his friendliest, in the dish-throwing, door-pounding, exclamation-pointed manner of a comic strip.’

Director: John Cassavetes. 114 min. 1971. 35mm.

To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org or our Facebook event page


Saturday, April 17, 8pm

There’s Always Tomorrow Ticket information

There’s Always Tomorrow

“Once upon a time in sunny California,” reads the opening title card—cut to rain-soaked downtown Los Angeles, where toymaker Cliff Groves has a successful career, but little love from his family. Then one night the doorbell rings and former flame Norma Vale walks back into Cliff’s lonely life. Shot in striking B&W, Douglas Sirk’s incisive portrait of modern domestic life conveys the dread of the nuclear household in expressionistic shadows and features the fourth pairing of stars Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck (best known as the poisonous duo in Double Indemnity), There’s Always Tomorrow is one of the finest and most underrated films from the master of the Hollywood melodrama.

Director: Douglas Sirk. 84 min. 1956. 35mm.


Richard Brody will introduce the screening. He is the movie listings editor at The New Yorker, where he writes film reviews, a DVD column and the blog The Front Row; among his publications there are articles about François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Wes Anderson. He is the author of Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, published in 2008 by Metropolitan Books

To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org or our Facebook event page


Saturday, March 20, 7pm

Nothing Lasts Forever Ticket information

Nothing Lasts Forever

One of the original writers for Saturday Night Live, Tom Schiller is best known for his short films starring John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Phil Hartman and Chris Farley. Nothing Lasts Forever, Schiller’s still-unreleased feature film, takes place in a futuristic Manhattan run by the Port Authority, where bureaucratic testing regulates the lives of the island’s inhabitants. His creative hopes dashed after failing the artistic licensing exam, idealist Adam Beckett seeks a way out, resulting in a journey through the subterranean channels of the city and then to the moon. Inspired by Orwell and Art Deco and composed of b&w, color and 30s stock footage, Nothing Lasts Forever features the inspired cast of Zach Galligan, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sam Jaffe and Lauren Tom.

Director: Tom Schiller. 82 mins. 1984. 35mm.


Tom Schiller will appear in person to introduce several of his Schiller’s Reel shorts, including The Acid Generation, Don’t Look Back in Anger, Perchance to Dream, Java Junkie and La Dolce Gilda.

Michael Streeter, author of Nothing Lost Forever: The Films of Tom Schiller, will attend the screening of Nothing Lasts Forever and the book will be available for sale.

To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org or our Facebook event page


Saturday, February 20, 8pm

Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Ticket information

Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Distinguished for his inimitably subversive dialogue and fatalistic narratives, Russ Meyer is one of the true champions of independent film, having written, financed, cast, photographed and directed almost all of his features between 1959 and 1979. And within his singular body of work, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! remains one of his most seminal films—a lean, mean road movie with enough wit, punk glamour and lethal karate chops to fill an entire career. Greeted by a lukewarm audience upon its 1965 release, the film has come to be known as not only a quintessential exploitation film, but one of cinema’s true benchmarks. Full review.

This screening will be preceded by a sampling of trailers from other Russ Meyer films.

Director: Russ Meyer. 83 mins. 1965. 35mm.

To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org or our Facebook event page


Trailer



Saturday, January 16, 8pm

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover Ticket information

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

“Looks like catfood for constipated French rabbits!” Peter Greenaway’s hearty, lurid helping of Jacobean nastiness stuffs the eye (and all the other senses) with enough sex, gastronomy and haute couture for a half-dozen films. With subtlety thrown violently to the wind, the film is beautiful, demanding and appalling in equally meticulous measure, an overstuffed canvas with music by Michael Nyman, cinematography by Sacha Vierny and costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Bursting through all of this scatological splendor are the electrifying performances of the elite of ’80s West End theater, featuring Michael “Dumbledore” Gambon as the monstrously violent and boorish restaurateur Albert Spica, Helen Mirren as his adulterous wife and Tim Roth and Ciarán Hinds in very early film appearances. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is a sensorially overwhelming experience from one of the most talented, imposing, erudite and reviled filmmakers in the history of the cinema.

Director: Peter Greenaway. 98 mins. 1989. 35mm.

To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org


Saturday, December 19, 8pm

The Last Movie Ticket information

The Last Movie

Few films earn the adjective “notorious” as fully as does Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie—the director’s second feature (after his debut hit, Easy Rider) and very nearly his own last movie in Hollywood. Ostensibly a fractured fable about the corruptive influence of American moviemaking on a Peruvian village, the film almost becomes an enactment of the same, as Hopper slips out of character and deeper into unscripted, drug-addled madness in front of befuddled locals, co-stars and extras. But chaos and hubris aside, Hopper’s film remains a fascinating, spectacular crash-and-burn from a filmmaker as cozy with the Hollywood establishment as with experimental filmmakers like Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner and Alejandro Jodorowsky (whom Hopper at one point asked to edit the film). Also featuring cameos by Peter Fonda, Sam Fuller, Toni Basil and Kris Kristofferson, performing his tune “Me and Bobby McGee” the same year Janis Joplin made it a hit.

Director: Dennis Hopper. 108 mins. 1971.

To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org


Saturday, November 21, 7pm

Los Angeles Plays Itself Ticket information

Los Angeles Plays Itself

A “city symphony in reverse” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice), Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself dismantles not only popular stereotypes about The City of Angels, but also its most famous trademark, Hollywood. Packed with clips from nearly 200 films set in Los Angeles (not L.A., the nickname despised by the film’s narrator), Andersen’s immersive cine-essay divides and examines the city threefold: as background, character and subject. Drawing us into a fanatical, almost secret urban history Los Angeles Plays Itself is at once a hilarious travelogue and mesmerizing experience.

Director: Thom Andersen. 169 mins. 2003.

To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org


Trailer



Saturday, October 31, 8pm

Chopping Mall Killer Workout Ticket information

Fright Night VHS Double Feature: Killer Workout and Chopping Mall

Once upon a time, in an age henceforth known as “the Eighties,” film enjoyed a fundamental revolution: the “Home Video Boom.” You could watch almost anything at any time you wanted, at home, on a VHS tape. A considerable proportion of these films fell in the horror genre – cheap, chilling and decidedly horrible – all with lascivious cover art, ham-handed critics’ quotes, terrible puns and blatantly deceptive copy.

On October 31st, we will harken back to this fondly remembered era in cinema by screening a double feature of horror films—on VHS. There’ll be no new-fangled Blu-Ray quality here. As accompaniment, we’ll be screening some of our favorite trailers (and animated distributor logos) from other VHS horror titles.

One beer included with the admission price, so you’ll be set to play drinking games!


Killer Workout: “This Workout’s a Real Killer.” A textbook ’80s Slasher film, only with a unique pitch: the action takes place entirely around an aerobics gym. Death scenes, scare chords, laughable dialogue, ’80s dance music and a title track that cannot be missed.

Director: David A. Prior. 85 mins. 1986.

Full Review


Chopping Mall: “Where shopping can cost you an arm and a leg.” An illicit, after-hours “slumber party” at the local mall goes horribly awry when a gaggle of horny teenagers meet the shopping center’s new security system: killer robots! A great electro-nerd-pop soundtrack, winking dialogue and incessant explosions make this exercise in sci-fi-consumerist horror a real bargain.

Director: Jim Wynorski. 77 mins. 1986.

Full Review


To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org


Saturday, September 26, 8pm

The Beaver Trilogy Ticket information

The Beaver Trilogy

Trent Harris’ The Beaver Trilogy begins with a serendipitous encounter in a random parking lot in Salt Lake city between the filmmaker and a young, exuberant young man obsessed with Olivia Newton-John. Their exchange is repeated three times during the course of the film, first in nonfiction footage shot in 1979, then in two reenactments (starring Sean Penn and Crispin Glover, respectively) that expand, clarify, or distort the events of the first installment. The result is a uniquely bizarre and yet astonishing work that demonstrates the very nature of cinema as a process of rehearsal, performance and reiteration. Full review.

Director: Trent Harris. 83 mins. 2000.

To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org


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