Mos Def and Jack Black have a wacky plan to save their video store in BE KIND REWIND
BE KIND REWIND (Michel Gondry, 2008)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, November 8, 4:30
Series runs through November 8 – December 27
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
When old man Fletcher (Danny Glover) takes off for a week, leaving Mike (Mos Def) in charge of his soon-to-be-demolished video store called Be Kind Rewind (they don’t have any DVDs or recent movies), his most important rule is to “Keep Jerry Out.” Jerry (Jack Black) is a crazy conspiracy theorist who covers himself in metal to ward off alien rays. After a botched attack on the local power plant, Jerry becomes a walking magnet (in a laugh-out-loud hysterical scene) and unknowingly erases all the videos in the store. Taking a page from the Little Rascals plots when Spanky and Alfalfa would suddenly put on a show for some local cause, Mike and Jerry recruit Alma (Melonie Diaz) as they proceed on their very strange attempts at Sweding — making their own versions of such films as Ghostbusters, Rush Hour 2, and Robocop and renting them out as if they were the real thing. Following the brilliant Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the extremely strange The Science of Sleep, writer-director Michel Gondry has fashioned a really stupid movie that has an overabundance of heart and charm. Glover and Mos Def are soft and gentle in this Capra-esque comedy, offsetting Black’s hyperactivity. Every time you’re ready to write the film off as being just too silly and ridiculous, something comes along to make you double over in laughter. Be Kind Rewind kicks off the Museum of the Moving Image series “Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact,” being held in conjunction with the new exhibition that examines how contemporary artists have used iconic Hollywood imagery in their work, with sculptures, photographs, paintings, videos, drawings, and more by Francis Alÿs, Richard Avedon, Jim Campbell, Gregory Crewdson, Jean-Luc Godard, Douglas Gordon, Isaac Julien, Martin Kippenberger, Guy Maddin, Mary Ellen Mark, Richard Prince, Tom Sachs, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Piotr Uklanski, Pierre Bismuth, and many others. Be Kind Rewind is screening November 8 at 7:00, preceded by Oscar winner Bismuth’s Where Is Rocky II? trailer. Bismuth will introduce the films, then participate in an artist talk with curator Robert M. Rubin afterward. After a break, the series picks up after Thanksgiving, continuing through December 27 with such iconic and influential classics as Dr. Strangelove, Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, Chinatown, Psycho, and The Wild Bunch as well as several cult faves by Maddin, who will be on hand to talk about his latest, The Forbidden Room, on December 12.
Named Best Documentary at numerous film festivals across the country, Marwencol offers a surprising look inside the creative process and the fine line that exists between art and reality. On April 8, 2000, Mark Hogancamp was nearly beaten to death outside a bar in his hometown of Kingston, New York. He spent nine days in a coma and more than a month in the hospital before being released, suffering severe brain damage that has left his memory a blur. To help put his life back together, he began using toys and dolls — Barbies, celebrity replicas, army men — to re-create his personal journey. He makes dolls of his friends and relatives, the people he works with, and others, constructing an alternate WWII-era universe he calls Marwencol, complete with numerous buildings and plenty of Nazis. He captures the detailed story in photographs that are not only fascinating to look at but that also help him figure out who he was and who he can be. This miniature three-dimensional world is reminiscent of the two-dimensional one carefully fashioned by outsider artist Henry Darger in his fifteen-thousand-page manuscript, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, which also features an alternate reality involving military battles set amid stunning artwork. Director, producer, and editor Jeff Malmberg makes no judgments about Hogancamp, and asks the same of the audience. In his first full-length film, Malmberg shares the compelling story of a deeply troubled, flawed man suddenly forced to begin again, using art and creativity to bring himself back to life. He speaks with Hogancamp’s mother, his old roommate, the prosecutor who handled his case, and others who are first seen proudly holding the doll Hogancamp made of them. And Malmberg doesn’t turn away from the more frightening aspects of Hogancamp’s daily existence. Marwencol is an unforgettable portrait of lost identity and the long road to redemption. The film is screening November 10 at 8:00 as part of the IFC Center series “Stranger Than Fiction” and will be followed by a Q&A and book signing with Hogancamp and producer Chris Shellen, who collaborated on the new book Welcome to Marwencol (November 3, Princeton Architectural Press, $29.95).
To use George Roundy’s favorite adjective, Shampoo, is “great.” In this ’70s classic, Warren Beatty, who cowrote the screenplay with Robert Towne, stars as George, a Beverly Hills hairdresser who gives his wealthy clients more than just a cut-and-blow-dry. The film takes place primarily on November 4, 1968, as Nixon is battling Humphrey for the presidency, and George can’t keep it in his pants, running back and forth between Felicia (Lee Grant), Jackie (Julie Christie), and Lorna (Carrie Fisher) while trying to open his own shop, with help from business tycoon Lester (Jack Warden) — Felicia’s husband, Jackie’s lover, and Lorna’s father. The clothing is magnificent, as, of course, are the hairstyles. Ashby’s biting comedy wonderfully captures the sexual awakening of the 1970s in all its glory — and in all its vapidity. Horror fans should keep an eye out for Lester’s friend Sid Roth, who is played by gimmickmeister William Castle. Ashby, who died in 1988 at the age of fifty-nine, made only eleven narrative films and two concert documentaries in his too-brief life and career. Shampoo is screening in a new 4K digital restoration November 6 & 9 in the MoMA series “To Save and Project: The 13th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation,” with the first show introduced by Sony Pictures executive Grover Crisp. The series, which celebrates newly preserved and restored films, runs November 4-25 and includes a wide variety of works, from the original theatrical version of Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls and William K. Howard’s Don’t Bet on Women to Otto Rippert’s silent Homunculus and the director’s cut of Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Deutschland blieche Mutter, in addition to “The Unknown Orson Welles,” including scenes from The Other Side of the Wind and The Dreamers introduced by Welles’s longtime partner, Oja Kodar, and Munich Filmmuseum director Stefan Droessler.
Woody Allen’s best film in years, Blue Jasmine is a modern-day Streetcar Named Desire filtered through the Bernie Madoff scandal. Cate Blanchett won an Oscar for her marvelously nuanced and deeply textured performance as Jasmine French, an elegant socialite whose immensely wealthy husband, Hal (a wonderfully smarmy Alec Baldwin), amassed his fortune the new-fashioned way: by lying and cheating—only he was the rare financier who got caught and ended up in jail. Now broke and distraught, Jasmine moves in with her sister, Ginger (the delightful Sally Hawkins), a single mother with two kids living in a cramped apartment in San Francisco. Ginger and her ex-husband, Augie (an excellent Andrew Dice Clay), lost all their money by investing with Hal, and she is now trying to rebuild her life, working as a cashier and dating the gruff but dedicated Chili (a strong Bobby Cannavale). Not used to taking care of herself, Jasmine seems lost in a world that no longer treats her like a princess; she takes a job working for a dentist (Michael Stuhlbarg) and attends a computer class, but she is determined to regain her previous status. And that chance comes when she meets Dwight (a gentle Peter Sarsgaard), a man with grand plans who just might be the one to lead her back to the level to which she is accustomed.
