I celebrated the new year by proofing a final mock-up of my Spring arthouse calendar film series program. It will screen about 50 films. Some new. Some old. The selection usually nets an equal amount of praise and criticism. I put out a sneak preview of coming attractions on my FaceBook page the other day and within a few minutes received one enthusiastic remark from a reader looking forward to the latest Steven Soderbergh documentary about Spalding Gray (that one called And Everything Is Going Fine) while simultaneously getting one smack-down from a reader wanting to know why I won’t be screening González Iñárritu’s Biutiful, or Charles’ Ferguson’s excellent documentary regarding the details of our recent financial collapse, Inside Job, or even something so obviously winning as L’illusionist, which displays the latest animation of Sylvain Chomet of The Triplets of Belleville fame – especially as it is working from an unpublished screenplay by Jacques Tati. What could be more perfect for an arthouse theater? For those curious how this particular film curator made his final choices, here are my answers. READ MORE

The Film Society at Lincoln Center is wrapping up its superb Stanley Donen retrospective this week, and beyond the established masterpieces like Singin’ In the Rain lie charming curiosities like 1978′s Movie Movie. I missed the screening, but fortunately it is available to purchase from Amazon On Demand for $9.99. Structured like a 1930s Warner Bros. double bill (the on-screen production company is “Warren Brothers”), it pairs two hour-long features: the boxing melodrama “Dynamite Hands” and the backstage musical “Baxter’s Beauties of 1933″. Scripted with loving exaggeration by Larry Gelbart (still cranking out MASH episodes at the time) and Sheldon Keller (a veteran TV writer who started with Sid Ceasar), it’s both a parody of and an homage to the Golden Age of Hollywood. Complete with faux flyboy trailer for “Zero Hour” (“War at its best!”), it’s a similarly nostalgia-soaked recreation of past movie-going experiences as Grindhouse, with an equally poor reception at the box office.

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Elvis Week begins tomorrow in Memphis, and fans and tourists are descending on the King’s city to mark the 33^rd anniversary of his death with a week of concerts, movies, Graceland tours, and informal get-togethers. This year would have been Elvis’s 75^th birthday, adding a special note to Elvis Week. To honor—and exploit—both occasions, Fathom Cinema Events presented a special showing of the concert documentary Elvis on Tour on July 29. At 7:00pm in select theaters around the country for one showing only, Elvis on Tour graced the big screens for the first time since 1972. Having seen the film several times and written about it in various books, I thought I knew everything there was to know about this documentary, but seeing it on a huge screen in a theater made it a new experience. In addition, the film was preceded by a new introduction that provided enlightening details about the production, the filmmakers, and Elvis’s response to their approach.

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Exactly one week ago today I was in a clear green field near an aspen grove here in Colorado, staring down at a suspiciously mutilated cow. Aside for a few flies, nothing else was near it. Oblivious to its gender I dubbed it “Fred.” My girlfriend and I took some pictures and we continued along on our hike. Less than an hour later we returned along the same path only to bear witness to one of the most bizarre things either of us had ever seen: a bunch of Fred’s pals – PREVIOUSLY far afield and seemingly (and understandably) avoiding the poor, dead beast – were NOW suddenly swirling about Fred’s carcass in a frenzy, like white-on-rice or flies-on-poop. They were jumping on top of each other and pushing one another around in an almost perfect circular pattern, trampling about on poor, dead, Fred. I’ve seen my share of punk shows, but this was one slow-motion-mosh-pit-from-hell scene I’ll never forget. There was something so downright unnatural about this spectacle that both my girlfriend and I immediately got the heebie-jeebies.

To honor the weirdness that occurred one week ago today, today’s blog looks at how a movie buff digests such a strange event. READ MORE

Photographer Julius Shulman may not be a household name but you’ve probably seen his work or at least its influence in Hollywood films. Shulman spent much of his life photographing architectural wonders in Los Angeles and his photos of private homes, office buildings and public structures helped shape the way that we all see the “City of Angels.”

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Color me green with envy after reading all those positive reports from all over about the recent TCM Classic Film Festival. While giving friends who attended the third degree to extract every droplet of vicarious enjoyment from their accounts of that long, delirious weekend in LA, one of the things that stands out in their reporting is the mention of the large number of young people in the audience, as well as the “lifers,” (aka those of us who have been movie-mad since childhood).  Recently, I was delighted to make the acquaintance of a youthful filmmaker who could be representative of this fresh wave of classic film lovers on the horizon.

From the viewpoint of most of us, Rebecca Bozzo, a twenty-something graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, is already a working film professional, but her ebullient enthusiasm for what she describes as  the  “collaborative energy” of movie making has an infectious quality that blends real knowledge and a joyous passion, even as she describes the sometimes arduous but invigorating process of collaboration with diverse people. Growing up in a household where her supportive parents exposed her to great films from Hitchcock, Cukor, Stevens, and Minnelli, her father was particularly involved in the National Film Society efforts to preserve films. With this cinematically aware family background, a growing desire to be a part of the film industry as a director and producer almost seems inevitable.

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Director Alex Gibney came to prominence with an eye-opening look at financial corruption in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which was nominated for an Oscar in 2006. He would go on to actually win the coveted statuette in 2008 for another doc, this one looking at the horrors inflicted by U.S. policies condoning torture in Taxi to the Dark Side. Taking a breather from these tragedies, his next subject was Hunter S. Thompson, which must have recharged his batteries significantly because this year alone he releases three films – and the subjects are Freakonomics, Al-Qaeda, and infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Given the recent blog topic dealing with Native American Images on Film, Gibney’s doc on Abramoff, titled Casino Jack and the United States of Money, hits on a related note. No, it doesn’t touch on “Race & Hollywood,” but it’s got a heaping big dose of privileged, rich, white-guys-in-power defrauding Indian tribes. It doesn’t stop there because, as is abundantly clear to anyone paying attention to our political climate, we are all being defrauded by a corrupt system that works overtime for money rather than principles.  READ MORE

The inaugural TCM Classic Film Festival kicks off on April 22nd, and there’s going to be wall-to-wall coverage here once it begins. Jeff Stafford has already posted a wide-ranging, must-read interview with Norman Lloyd, who’ll be introducing Saboteur on the 25th. But like the Cannes Film Festival a few weeks later (May 12 – 23), I’ll be unable to attend, marooned as I am on the East Coast. But I’ll be checking back here at Movie Morlocks for reports on the TCM-fest, and there will be an endless array of outlets covering Cannes. But what about seeing the films, the vast majority of which won’t receive stateside distribution?

The on-line cinematheque The Auteurs has come through for me on at least one title on my list, with an assist by Stella Artois. They’re streaming nine former Cannes selections for free thanks to that mediocre Belgian beer sponsor. These include Our Beloved Month of August (2008), a Portuguese experiment highly regarded by  Cinema Scope’s Mark Peranson and Robert Koehler, Jonathan Romney of Sight & Sound, and filmmaker C.W. Winter (The Anchorage, which I wrote about recently), who placed it on his best-of-the-decade list. It was never picked up for the U.S., and I was ecstatic to find it offered along with a group of higher-profile past Cannes selections including L’aaventura, Mon Oncle, and Amarcord.  The kind of curatorial adventurousness that led to August being included among this canonical group is sorely needed in programming these days, and The Auteurs should be praised (once again), for loosing this strange beast upon American eyes.

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Young New York filmmaker Zachary Levy’s debut feature, Strongman, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2009 Slamdance Film Festival and is now finally hopping around to select cities. The documentary follows a modern-day hulk by the name of Stanley “Stanless Steel” Pleskun. For his day job, Stanley hauls around scrap metal. But his every waking moment seems consumed by a dream of being the best in a small field of metal-bending and strong-man athletic performers. Strongman is a compelling documentary full of heart, humor, and pathos that recalls the achievements of Chris Smith’s American Movie. Its carnivelesque quality and eccentric characters would not be out of place in a film by Federico Fellini, but the more immediate and inevitable comparison reviewers are apt to mention is Darren Aronofosky’s The Wrestler. After all, both films “feature longhaired, seemingly past their prime fringe athletes living in a dilapidated New Jersey who are chasing a dwindling dream as the outside world relentlessly presses down upon them.” (Michael Tully) Last week while visiting Austin’s SXSW Film Festival I met Zachary and we had a chance to talk about his film. READ MORE