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Steve
Dollar and 89 year old New York filmmaker Jonas Mekas reminisce over
the demise the famous East Village Bar and subject of Mekas' most
recent docu-diary, My
Mars Bar Movie.
"We came into
existence together, so it was friendship," he said, chatting over
Lithuanian beer and vodka shots at the Anyway Cafe, one of several East
Village bars he frequents more often since Mars Bar closed last June
(and was subsequently demolished). The demise of the bar, a refuge for
the neighborhood's old-school bohemians, artists and rogues, prompted
the filmmaker to edit more than 15 years of casual video footage into
the film, which runs this
weekend at Anthology. Read
more >> |
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In
This Dispatch:
- What's
New: Crime after Crime, Alambrista! (Criterion).
- What
We're Watching: Paul Goodman Changed My Life, A Trip to the Moon
(Restored Limited Edition).
- Explore:
Hong Sang Two, Beyond Here Lies Nyukkin'.
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In
1983 Debbie Peagler sought protection from the man who forced her into
prostituion, beat her, and molested her daughter through her
neighborhood's Crips gang members. They killed him, and subsequently
Peagler was charged and plead guilty to first-degree murder in order to
avoid the death penalty. She spent 20 years behind bars before
a new California law gave her the opportunity to re-open her case. A
real-life courtroom drama of the highest order, the NY
Times calls this doc
"magnificent, swelling from hushed to howling without the help of
narration or posturing from the unfailingly dignified Peagler or her
quietly dedicated lawyers. There may well be, as one of her lawyers
claims, 'thousands and thousands of Debbies across the U.S.,' but it is
this particular one who makes it difficult to leave the theater with
dry eyes and an untouched heart." |
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"When
it was first released in 1977, ¡Alambrista!
depicted
something previously unseen in American fiction films—the
lives of undocumented Mexican immigrants from their point of
view," notes Charles
Ramírez Berg in his
essay for Current. Once extremely difficult to track down though it won
the pretigious Camera d'Or at Cannes in 1978, the film "was important
then—and is now—is because it balanced, deepened,
and enriched our national conversation about immigration." The
film, starring a young Edward James Olmos, is a stark and
vivid
intimate character study and part road movie. The Criterion release
includes the short documentary Children of the Fields,
which the director shot during his year living with illegal immigrants
along the Mexican-US border.
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Paul
Goodman didn't change my life. Unfortunately. But I wish he had. Born
30 years before me (in 1911), he published his famous work, Growing Up
Absurd, around the time I was attending a Christian Science school
(Principia College), a place at which a fellow like Goodman -- proudly
bisexual and "out" (before the use of that word had even come into
being!) -- would not have found favor. Once I abandoned that foolish
religion and began to grow up (absurd or not), I did learn something of
Goodman and read an occasional essay of his. Read more >> |
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Thanks to the happy success of Martin
Scorsese's Hugo,
the French silent era filmmaker Georges
Méliès is
now far better known to the general public. Flicker
Alley, which distributed a
massive box
set of surviving
Méliès films, has now released a special new
two-disc "steelbook" set. It features a brand-new, restored version of
Méliès' most famous film, the 14-minute A
Trip to the Moon,
with the original hand-tinted color back in place, and a new score by
Air. And on Blu-Ray.
Read more >> |
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2005's
A Tale of Cinema
inaugurated the second phase of Korean auteur Hong
Sang-soo's career (Hong 2.0),
introducing basic components returned to and toyed with in every
subsequent film: drunken directors who swear to change their lives
before lapsing a scene later, women alternately being idealized/treated
badly but granted final telling-off authority, events repeating
themselves with no explanation, goofily inelegant zoom shots. Oki's
Movie
( screening in NYC through April 22nd)
is an excellent introduction for novices, distilling and compacting the
familiar elements of Hong's last seven years into 80 minutes, his
shortest-ever feature by eight minutes.
Read more >>
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The
original proposed cast for the Farrelly brothers' feature was a
dramatic power-house— Jim
Carrey, Benicio
Del Toro, Sean
Penn—that would've
underscored every eye-gouge and double-slap with considerable darkness.
After more than a decade of development delay, the resulting The
Three Stooges
is an angst-free 91 minutes, the zippiest Farrelly project since their
'90s Dumb
and Dumber
heyday. Watching it is like being run over by a bus and liking it. Read more >> |
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Bartender,
I'll Have Another
Podcasts!
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