Charlie Chaplin seeks to strike it rich in THE GOLD RUSH
THE GOLD RUSH (Charlie Chaplin, 1925)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Through December 29
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
Charlie Chaplin died thirty-four years ago on Christmas Day, at the ripe old age of eighty-eight, so Film Forum is paying tribute to the anniversary by screening a restored 35mm print of the complete version, with a newly recorded orchestral score, of what Chaplin called “the picture I want to be remembered by.” Made four years prior to the Great Depression, the slapstick comedy is still remarkably socially relevant, tackling unemployment, crime, hunger, and poverty. Chaplin, who wrote, produced, and directed the silent masterpiece, stars as the Lone Prospector, a little tramp who has set out to strike it rich during the Alaskan Gold Rush of 1848 but isn’t really having much luck. He takes shelter during a snowstorm in a small shack, does battle with a pair of much bigger men, turns into a chicken, and, yes, eats his shoe, doing whatever it takes to survive. The prescient film was originally to star Lita Grey as the love interest, but Chaplin impregnated (and later married) the sixteen-year-old, so she was replaced by Georgia Hale. Film Forum is screening The Gold Rush, which also features Mack Swain as Big Jim McKay, Malcolm Waite as ladies’ man Jack Cameron, and Tom Murray as Black Larsen, through December 29, including five times on Christmas Day. (And by the way, if you’ve only seen Charles Chaplin’s reedited 1942 version with his own treacly narration and score, well, you’ve never really experienced this American treasure.)
While churches around the city are filling up for midnight mass on Christmas Eve, you can have a completely different kind of religious experience at the IFC Center, one of New York’s cinematic temples. Inspired by Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain also involves symbolically non-Euclidean adventures in mountain climbing, funneled through Carlos Castaneda, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and magic mushrooms and LSD galore. What passes for narrative follows a Jesus look-alike thief (Horacio Salinas) and an alchemist with a thing for female nudity (Jodorowsky) on the path to enlightenment; along the way they encounter the mysterious Tarot, stigmata, stoning, eyeballs, frogs, flies, cold-blooded murder, naked young boys, chakra points, life-size plaster casts, Nazi dancers, sex, violence, blood, gambling, turning human waste into gold, death and rebirth, and the search for the secret of immortality via representatives of the planets, each with their own extremely bizarre story to tell. Jodorowsky, who is credited with having invented the midnight movie with the acid Western El Topo (1970), literally shatters religious iconography in a kaleidoscopic whirlwind of jaw-droppingly gorgeous and often inexplicable imagery composed from a surreal color palette, set to a score by free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and Archies keyboardist Ron Frangipane. (Frangipane also worked with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who produced this film with their business manager, Allen Klein.) The Holy Mountain — which brings a whole new insight to Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle — is filled with psychedelic mysticism centered around the human search for transcendence in a wilderness of the sacred and profane. Jodorowsky’s work can move you deeply, but don’t expect it to make much sense. Sit back and let in pour in and over you — you’ll feel it. You may hate it, but you’ll feel it. Although you’ll definitely hate the very end. The film is also screening on Christmas night and New Year’s weekend at the IFC Center, offering one helluva way to welcome in 2012.
Will Ferrell is a hoot in this somewhat overrated Christmas movie that starts out with such promise before descending into sappy melodrama and seasonal cliché hell. Ferrell stars as Buddy the elf, a human orphan who crawls inside Santa’s bag one Xmas Eve and grows up to become an unusually big worker in the North Pole. When he finally realizes he’s different from everyone around him, he sets out to New York City to find his birth father, who turns out to be a tough, ruthless publisher (James Caan) who neglects his family. It’s hard not to laugh nearly every time you see the gleam in Ferrell’s eye, the curls in his hair, or the hysterical outfit he’s wearing as he makes his way through Gimbels (Macy’s), the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink, the Empire State Building, Central Park, and other local landmarks. Teaming Ed (Lou Grant) Asner and Bob (Bob Hartley) Newhart, who used to be on CBS back to back on Saturday nights, is a nice touch. And the scene with Peter Dinklage as a mega-successful but rather diminutive children’s book writer is awesome, even if the movie has no idea how kids’ books are really made. It’s too bad this sharp-edged comedy had to turn all warm and fuzzy in the end, but it might not matter quite so much at these midnight holiday screenings.