The Hanson Brothers revel in some good old-time hockey fun in SLAP SHOT
SLAP SHOT (George Roy Hill, 1977)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Friday, February 3, 1:30 & 7:30
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
www.hansonbrothers.net
One of the best sports films ever made, Slap Shot is a riotously bloody look at minor-league hockey. Paul Newman — who declared this one of his favorite pictures — stars as Reggie Dunlop, an aging loser serving as player-coach of the Charlestown Chiefs and trying to keep his marriage going with Francine (Jennifer Warren). When the general manager (Strother Martin) tells him that the team is being shut down at the end of the season, Dunlop decides to send it off with a bang. Lying to his team that if the Chiefs fill the seats and start winning they will move to Florida, he incorporates a different style of play into their game, led by the brutal, vicious, and utterly hilarious Hanson brothers (real-life brothers Jeff and Steve Carlson and their Johnstown Jets teammate Dave Hanson), who never met an opponent they wouldn’t punch, trip, slash, spear, or slam face-first into the boards well after the whistle. Even Dunlop gets in on the fun, throwing his share of right hands. The only player not participating in the hijinks is Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), who believes in sportsmanship and a more gentlemanly game of skill and beauty, not exactly what men like Ogie Oglethorpe (minor-league player Ned Dowd, whose sister, Nancy, wrote the book that the movie is based on, inspired by the real-life antics of the Johnstown Jets) and Tim “Dr. Hook” McCracken (Paul D’Amato) have in mind. You don’t have to be a hockey fan to love Slap Shot, which is really, when it comes right down to it, just a little film about the trials and tribulations of everyday life. Look for cameos by Paul Dooley, M. Emmett Walsh, Melinda Dillon, Nancy Dowd as Andrea, and actual hockey players Bruce Boudreau, Jean Tétreault, Connie Madigan, Cliff Thompson, and Joe Nolan, among others. Slap Shot is screening February 3 in the Metrograph series “Universal in the 70’s: Part One,” a tribute to the decade when the studio took advantage of the growing independent-cinema movement; the two-week, eighteen-film festival continues through February 7 with such other gems as Clint Eastwood’s awesome High Plains Drifter, Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot, Jeremy Kagan’s The Big Fix, and Don Siegel’s underseen Charley Varrick.
The Daughter is a taut Australian melodrama from actor, director, and writer Simon Stone, his feature directorial debut, inspired by his 2014 stage adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck for Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre company. The film builds slowly, teasing out the tension, until it gets so wrapped up in itself that the stream of revelations unfolding near the end feels overwrought and anticlimactic, as viewers will have figured out many of the twists much earlier. Still, it’s a compelling tale, well acted by a solid cast, although one overblown character nearly brings it all tumbling down. Ne’er-do-well prodigal son Christian (Paul Schneider) has returned home for the first time in fifteen years, for the wedding of his father, Henry (Geoffrey Rush), to his much younger housekeeper, Anna (Anna Torv). The wealthy local mill owner in a rural New South Wales town, Henry has just announced that his factory is closing. Christian, an alcoholic who is having problems with his girlfriend, Grace (Ivy Mak), and has never gotten over his mother’s death, reconnects with his childhood friend, Oliver (Ewen Leslie), a millworker who is married to Charlotte (Miranda Otto); they have a lovely daughter, teenager Hedvig (Odessa Young), a smart girl who is very close to her grandfather, Walter (Sam Neill), who takes care of a forest on his property as well as a home-made sanctuary for injured animals. Long-held secrets begin to emerge, spinning both families into severe crises as the past refuses to stay hidden.
If this post looks familiar, well, perhaps you read it last year, and before that, and maybe even before that. “Well, what if there is no tomorrow?” asks weatherman Phil Connors in Groundhog Day. “There wasn’t one today.” Bill Murray gives one of his most nuanced performances in the 1993 comedy, ably directed by his Stripes cohort, SCTV alum Harold Ramis. Murray stars as cynical, smarmy, mean-spirited meteorologist Phil Connors, who has been sent by his local TV station to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to cover the annual Groundhog Day festivities and report on whether Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow. He is joined by segment producer Rita (a radiant Andie MacDowell) and cameraman Larry (the always funny Chris Elliott), who find him to be a pompous ass. But just like Punxsutawney Phil comes out of his hole every February 2, Phil Connors is soon getting out of bed reexperiencing the same exact day, given the chance over and over to change, for better or worse. Besides being downright hysterical, Groundhog Day has a lot of heart, making it the kind of movie you can watch, well, over and over again, still pulling each time for Connors (who, not coincidentally, has the same name as the famous groundhog) to do the right thing and become a worthwhile human being. It seems that Murray does some of his best work when paired with a small, furry creature, like when he desperately tried to catch and kill a too-smart gopher in Caddyshack. And be on the lookout for Michael Shannon in his film debut, as the wet-behind-the-ears groom at a wedding celebration. The annual repeat Valentine screening of Groundhog Day at Nitehawk Cinema takes place on Groundhog Day itself at 9:30, with a Sweet Vermouth on the Rocks with a Twist drink special; it’s also National Tater Tot Day, so you can enjoy free tots if you bring a toy to donate to 
IFC Center is celebrating the January 27 theatrical release of Alex Infascelli’s documentary S Is for Stanley, about longtime Stanley Kubrick aide Emilio D’Alessandro, with a two-week festival that includes every one of the Bronx-born ex-pat’s feature works, nearly all of which are being projected in DCP, along with a pair in 35mm. Kubrick’s 1953 seldom-seen psychological war drama, Fear and Desire, will be shown on January 30, along with the auteur’s half-hour industrial short The Seafarers. His first full-length film, made when he was twenty-four, Fear and Desire is a curious tale about four soldiers (Steve Coit, Kenneth Harp, Paul Mazursky, and Frank Silvera) trapped six miles behind enemy lines. When they are spotted by a local woman (Virginia Leith), they decide to capture her and tie her up, but leaving Sidney (Mazursky) behind to keep an eye on her turns out to be a bad idea. Meanwhile, they discover a nearby house that has been occupied by the enemy and argue over whether to attack or retreat. Written by Howard Sackler, who was a high school classmate of Kubrick’s in the Bronx and would later win the Pulitzer Prize for The Great White Hope, and directed, edited, and photographed by the man who would go on to make such war epics as Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket, and Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Fear and Desire features stilted dialogue, much of which is spoken off-camera and feels like it was dubbed in later. Many of the cuts are jumpy and much of the framing amateurish. Kubrick was ultimately disappointed with the film and wanted it pulled from circulation; instead it was preserved by Eastman House in 1989 and restored twenty years later, which is good news for film lovers, as it is fascinating to watch Kubrick learning as the film continues. His exploration of the psyche of the American soldier is the heart and soul of this compelling black-and-white war drama that is worth seeing for more than just historical reasons. “There is a war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, nor one that will be, but any war,” narrator David Allen explains at the beginning of the film. “And the enemies who struggle here do not exist unless we call them into being. This forest then, and all that happens now, is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear and doubt and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time but have no other country but the mind.”
