REEL UNDERGROUND

FILM REVIEWS
AND CALENDAR
BY PAUL D. GOETZ




Alternative Venues are Rich in Premieres, Revivals

If you're looking for alternatives to the major studios' inevitable lineup of year-end Oscar hopefuls, there are plenty of relatively unheralded premieres and revivals from which to choose.

Selected Premieres:

Pike Street Cinema
(1108 Pike at Boren, 682-7064)

December 2-15
"Seven Mysteries of Life"
(written and directed by Gregg Lachow) . This amiably surreal film is a rambling, jokey dream. It's difficult to argue with it; no matter how banal or novel dreams are, they move to their own imperious logic. As with most dreams, time feels distorted or suspended, and people react to bizarre circumstances as if they're not unusual. This is the kind of film where one can speak to the dead from a phone booth, and where life's mysteries are revealed in a laundromat. Even Abraham Lincoln shows up.

On Halloween, Gregg, Kara, Megan and her little boy Sam take a ferry out of the causal machinery of Seattle city life to a nearby beach. As Megan says, "Timelessness is easier to achieve at the beach." It seems Gregg has built a time machine, and he wants the others to witness his departure to 1865 where he hopes to prevent Lincoln's assassination. When he actually does disappear, Kara, Megan and Sam do a lot of time killing themselves meandering around the little nearby town while they await his scheduled return.
It's a soft narrative framework; the edges dissolve to allow a dose of reality and the filmmaker's playfulness to spill in. Actors use their real names in the story. Characters might suddenly drop what they're doing to dance to a Tommy Dorsey tune, or casually come right out and describe the time machine as "a metaphor for something." Gregg even lets on that the machine, which looks like an octagonal photo booth, was built in two months at a cost of $100. It looks it, and that's part of the joke.
Lachow, it seems, is less concerned with telling a story than with dissolving the lines between audience and story, between story and storyteller: the dreamers are no more fantastic than the dream; the dream is no more fantastic than the dream machine. It's a gently liberating strategy - at least while we're watching - and no less satisfying even though it may disappear into the mists of memory by morning.

December 25
 (and running for at least two weeks)
"Half Cocked"
(directed by Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky) . This raucous, rock 'n' roll road pic has the look and some of the same self-mocking charm of Richard Linklater's Slacker. Like that seminal shaggy dog, Half Cocked focuses on drifting, disaffected youths, and is energized by an ensemble of non-actors occasionally used to great comedic effect. It's also electrified by a score that includes music by Rodan, The Grifters, Dungbeetle, Freakwater, Kicking Giant, Boondoggle, and others.

Tara, the story's teen narrator, is ready for a major change. She's an alien to her parents and older brother, the rude, lewd leader of a band called the Guillotines. When her brother humiliates her on stage after one of his shows, she skips town with his band's equipment in their parents' van, picking up her friends along the way. They've dreamed of forming their own band, and now with no money, and instruments they don't know how to set up - let alone play - they manage to go on tour, and even play a couple gigs.
It's an amusing odyssey. Reduced to shoplifting for food, they choose a convenience store and come away with candy and potato chips. "We suck at this!" says one. In one of the film's funniest moments, they leave a young audience awestruck by adding the sound of beer bottles dropping into a garbage can to one of their noisy experimental performances.
Unfortunately, the filmmakers can't help aiming for a measure of poignancy, and it usually falls flat. Tara's home life is tritely portrayed, and Rhonda, as Tara, is so restrained she's nearly asleep. It doesn't help that her too quiet narration suffers from some distortion. But that aside, the directors have succeeded in creating a raggedly entertaining diversion, and like their young characters, what they lack in skill, they more than make up for in enthusiasm.

December 23-29
"The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb"
(directed by Dave Borthwick) . The word-of-mouth was very good on this hour-long film at the 1994 Seattle International Film Festival. A tiny mutant baby named Tom Thumb is abducted from his tenement-dwelling parents to a government laboratory, eventually escaping into a fantasy world where he unites with a kind of Jack the Giant Killer and other mutants, returning finally to reality to fight the evil powers that destroyed his world. In the January 1994 issue of Sight and Sound, Leslie Felperin Sharman writes that it "makes sly digs at genetic engineering and animal testing" and "Despite the emphasis on monstrosity, flecks of pathos shine through..." The Varsity Film Calendar describes it as "a wondrous blend of live action and stop-frame animation delivering a dark, twisted, yet enchanting version of the classic fairy tale." Showing with the award-winning short Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life.

January 13-16
"In the Land of the Deaf"
(directed by Nicolas Philibert). According to its director, this award-winning documentary is designed to "plunge the viewer into the world of the deaf, a film whose mother tongue would be sign language." However, it's a surprisingly accessible experience, one that exposes the viewer to the lyrical beauty of gestural language and the richness of another culture. In her New York Times review, Caryn James describes it as "a warm, engrossing, eye-opening experience."

Selected Revivals:

The Seattle Art Museum
(100 University St., 654-3121)

SAM is finishing its Fall Film Series "Night Is My Beat, The Film Noir Cycle" with three gems, both in 35 mm. While the series is officially sold out, it is nearly always possible to get a ticket at the door if you arrive early.

December 1
"Pickup on South Street"
(1953) . Writer-director Samuel Fuller taps into the 50s' anti-Communist paranoia with this exciting, solidly crafted tale of pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) who inadvertently lifts some top secret microfilm from Candy (Jean Peters) who thinks she's passing corporate secrets for a boyfriend who is actually a Communist sympathizer. Oscar-nominated Thelma Ritter plays Moe, a stooley and Skip's friend who nevertheless sells him out to the police for $38.50 - but not to the Commies for $500 or even at the threat of death. The struggle for Skip's soul looks lost (he's willing to sell the film for the right price), but no one is counting on Candy's scrappy resourcefulness or her growing love for him. The film is remarkable for its powerful female characters; refreshingly, their strength does not derive from evil. Fuller, a former crime reporter, vagabond, pulp novelist, and war hero, had a talent for combining (and sometimes pushing to extremes) the lurid and the poignant - often in the same frame.

December 8
"Pushover"
(1954) . Police officers learn a thing or two about women (the hard way for one of them) in this energetic and intelligently handled story directed by Richard Quine. Kim Novak is the devastatingly beautiful gangster's moll under surveillance by the police (and every other man in her vicinity); they're waiting for him to contact her with the $200,000 he got in a bank heist. Fred MacMurray is the cop whose brain begins to boil as he watches her through his binoculars. She eventually suggests they knock off her boyfriend and start over with the money, and though he sweats it out for awhile, battling his conscience, it's only a matter of time before he throws his pension out the window. It's great fun watching MacMurray squirm in her web and even better watching their plans slowly unravel.

Meanwhile,MacMurray's partner Rick (Phil Carey), who's had no use for women, gradually falls in love - through binoculars - with the wholesome nurse in the apartment adjacent to Novak's. It's a good thing no one closes their drapes in this one.

December 15
"Experiment in Terror"
(1962) . This eerie suspenser was a departure for comedy and romance director Blake Edwards and it begins to look like one of the high points of his career. Strikingly photographed by Philip Lathrop and featuring one of the late Henry Mancini's best scores, it's still able to generate shocks and a palpable dread while relying, not on graphic violence, but on evocative lighting and camera angles, a series of startling cuts, and moody, mysterious music.

The opening sequence finds bank teller Kelly Sherwood (Lee Remick) driving home over San Francisco's Bay Bridge. The lights of the many cars stream along, glistening in accordance with Mancini's harp glissandos while a low reverberating guitar (the inspiration for part of composer Angelo Badalamenti's Twin Peaks score?) informs the scene with melancholy. In the car the camera lovingly surveys the city lights and then swings 180 degrees to Kelly at the wheel. She turns to nearly face the camera with an odd expectant look. You already wish you could help her, but there's no turning back. Once inside her garage (she lives in a neighborhood called Twin Peaks), the door closes as if by itself, the wall behind her is rippling with leafy shadows, and the air is filled with the wheezing of a killer who begins a reign of terror. His plan is to coerce her into stealing $100,000 from her bank and he's not above using her sister as a lever.
The killer himself is gradually revealed during the film, but early on he is shot in obscure darkened close-ups; Edwards realizes that our imaginations are the best tools he can use to frighten us. Upon hearing that the killer's last name is Lynch, you realize this film must have been close to the heart of director David Lynch. Also with Glenn Ford as the stalwart FBI man on the case and Stephanie Powers in her debut as Kelly's sister Toby.

The Varsity
(4329 University Way NE, 632-3131)

January 6-9
"Diabolique"
(1955) . Oh, to have seen this film when it was first released! Well, now it is possible to at least see it as it must have been shown to the first audiences abroad thanks to this new 35 mm print that restores 9 minutes of additional footage. For many years only sub-par 16 mm prints have been available of the film that until Psycho was considered the most frightening thriller of all time. Christina (Vera Clouzot), the weak-hearted headmistress of a school for boys, and Nicole (Simone Signoret), one of its teachers, plot to kill headmaster Michel (Paul Meurisse), Christina's abusive husband and Nicole's former lover. Like Hitchcock, Clouzot was a master of suspenseful pacing, and equally meticulous in planning each shot. Clouzot, however, eschews nearly all humor, pessimistically giving all the characters and settings a sinister quality. Interestingly, water is used effectively to express the saturating malevolence, from the opening credits shot against the murky surface of the school pool, to a muddy puddle in which a boy's paper boat is crushed under the wheels of a car, to the bathtub used as an instrument of murder. Even the fish dinner turns their stomachs. A must-see.

Shining Moment Films
The Belltown Theater
(115 Blanchard, 325-1364)

December 11
"Nitrate Visions"
Shorts by Harold Lloyd, Winsor McCay, and Edwin S. Porter will be shown at 7 and 9 PM. Local musicians will provide live accompaniment.



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Contents on this page were published in the December/January 1995 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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Copyright © 1994 WFP Collective, Inc.
Goetz