this week in film and television

WEEKEND CLASSICS: BLACKMAIL

HITCHCOCK, PART II: BLACKMAIL (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
September 14-16, 11:00 am
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Based on the play by Charles Bennett, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 thriller, Blackmail, is both his last silent picture as well as his first sound film. The transition is evident from the very beginning, eight glorious minutes of a police arrest with incidental music only, highlighted by an unforgettable mirror shot (courtesy of cinematographer Jack E. Cox) as the cops close in on their suspect. After those opening moments, the film switches to a talkie, as New Scotland Yard detective Frank Webber (John Longden) gets into a fight with his girlfriend, Alice White (Anny Ondra, later to become the longtime Mrs. Max Schmeling), who goes off on a secret rendezvous with a slick artist named Crewe (Cyril Ritchard). When things go horribly wrong at Crewe’s studio, Frank assures Alice that he will help her, but slimy ex-con Tracy (Donald Calthrop) has other ideas, thinking he can use some inside information to make a small killing. After shooting the picture with sound — including having Ondra’s dialogue spoken off-screen by Joan Barry because Ondra’s Eastern European accent was too thick — Sir Alfred filmed some scenes over again in silence, resulting in two versions of this splendid psychological thriller, both laced with elements of German Expressionism and early film noir as well as flashes of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Look for Alfred as the man on the subway being menaced by a young boy. The sound version of Blackmail is being screened September 14-16 at the IFC Center as part of the “Weekend Classics: Hitchcock, Part II” series, which continues in September with such other early Hitchcock films as Secret Agent and Number 17.

BIKE-IN MOVIES: SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS

James Murphy says farewell to LCD Soundsystem in multifaceted concert documentary

SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS (Dylan Southern & Will Lovelace, 2011)
The Well
272 Meserole Ave.
Saturday, September 15, free with RSVP, 7:00
347-338-3612
www.thewell.com
www.shutupandplaythehits.com

On April 2, 2011, after ten years of building a devoted following that was still growing, electronic dance-punk faves LCD Soundsystem played its farewell show at Madison Square Garden. Directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, who previously documented the British band Blur in No Distance Left to Run, capture the grand finale in the often bumpy, sometimes revelatory concert film Shut Up and Play the Hits. The movie is divided into three distinct sections that take place before, during, and after the massive blowout, with Southern and Lovelace weaving between them. There is extensive footage of the event at the Garden, including performances of such LCD classics as “Dance Yrself Clean,” “All My Friends,” “Us v Them,” “North American Scum,” and “Losing My Edge.” Although the multicamera approach tries to make you feel like you’re there, onstage and backstage with front man James Murphy, keyboardist Nancy Whang, bassist Tyler Pope, drummer Pat Mahoney, and various special guests, it lacks a certain emotional depth, and the sound, primarily during the first songs, is terrible, although that could have been the fault of the tiny theater we saw it at more than the film itself. The second section features music journalist Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto) interviewing Murphy at the Spotted Pig in the West Village a week before the concert, asking inane, annoying questions that Murphy strains to answer. But the most fascinating part of the film by far, and how it starts, involves Murphy the day after the show. He allows the camera to follow him everywhere, from waking up in his bed with his dog to carefully shaving with an electric razor to visiting the DFA offices for the first time in a year. It’s hard to believe that the night before he was a grandiose rock star but now he is walking his pooch, sitting on a bench in front of a coffee shop, and spending most of the day alone. The camera literally gets right into his face, showing every gray hair, zooming in on his puffiness and his deep-set, nearly dazed eyes. The film would have benefited from less time with Klosterman and more with Murphy as he contemplates his past, present, and future. It also would have been interesting to hear from the other members of the band, but Shut Up and Play the Hits is specifically about Murphy, who, at forty-one, suddenly doesn’t know what to do with his life, having left an extremely successful gig that was only gaining popularity. The film is having a special showing on September 15 at the Well’s outdoor space in Brooklyn on a thirty-foot screen as part of the “Bike-In Movies” series and will kick off with a set by DJ Dubspot. Admission is free with advance RSVP, and the bar and kitchen will remain open throughout the event.

THE JOSHUA LIGHT SHOW

The Joshua Light Show will team up with a diverse series of experimental musicians for six groovy shows at the Skirball Center

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
60 Washington Sq. South
September 13-16, $20-$68
212-998-4941
www.nyuskirball.org
www.joshualightshow.com

A key figure in the psychedelic movement of the late 1960s, the Joshua Light Show created dizzying, kaleidoscopic, all-too-groovy projections at the Fillmore East, Woodstock, Carnegie Hall, and other venues, where their liquid lights exploded in a vast array of colors behind Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, and other legendary musicians. Over the last several years, JLS has returned with a vengeance, performing at Lincoln Center, the Hayden Planetarium, the Hirshorn Museum, Art Basel in Miami, and the recent Transmediale festival in Berlin. This week founder Joshua White and his talented crew, which still primarily uses analog techniques to mix their creations live, will be at the NYU Skirball Center for six performances over four nights, beginning Thursday, when they are joined by Scottish percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie and master harpist Zeena Parkins. Friday night features the minimalist father-and-son duo of Terry Riley and Gyan Riley at 7:30, followed by the inspired quartet of John Zorn, Lou Reed, Bill Laswell, and Milford Graves at 10:00. On Saturday night, MGMT cofounders Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden will play two shows, with GlobalFest closing things out on Sunday with the Boston-based Ethiopian-American Debo Band and the New York-based Brazilian-American Forro in the Dark. Each performance will last approximately one hour, with JLS onstage improvising alongside the musicians; the JLS team includes White, photographer and installation artist Alyson Denny, experimental composer and vocalist Nick Hallett, filmmaker and musician Seth Kirby, Ana Matronic of the Scissor Sisters, live cinema artist and designer Brock Monroe, painter and comic-book artist Gary Panter, production manager Doug Pope, performance artist and director Bec Stupak, and sound designer Jeff Cook.

KOREAN MOVIE NIGHT: ROMANCE JOE

ROMANCE JOE is made up of an interweaving collection of related narratives built around the suicide of a famous actress

GEMS OF KOREAN CINEMA: ROMANCE JOE (RO-MAEN-SEU-JO) (Lee Kwang-kuk, 2011)
Tribeca Cinemas
54 Varick St. at Laight St.
Tuesday, September 11, free, 7:00
212-759-9550
www.koreanculture.org
www.tribecacinemas.com

Following in the footsteps of his mentor, Hong sang-soo, for whom he served as assistant director for five years, Lee Kwang-kuk’s debut film, Romance Joe, is a complex, engaging narrative about the art of storytelling. Made up of interweaving tales that eventually come together in surreal ways, mixing fantasy and reality, Romance Joe begins as an elderly mother and father (Kim Su-ung and Park Hye-jin) arrive in Seoul to surprise their son, a film director, but they are informed by his friend, Seo Dam (Kim Dong-hyeon), that he has disappeared after the suicide of a popular actress and has given up the film business. Soon Dam is telling his friend’s parents his own idea for a screenplay, about a determined young boy (Ryu Ui-hyeon) who runs away from home to find his mother at the only address he has for her, a teahouse brothel, where the owner, Re-ji (Shin Dong-mi), isn’t sure what to do with him. Meanwhile, Lee (Jo Han-cheol), a director with one hit under his belt and now facing writer’s block, has been left at a country inn without his cell phone, forced to finish his next screenplay. He orders coffee that is delivered by the movie-obsessed Re-ji, who tells him the story of Romance Joe (Kim Yeong-pil), a suicidal film director who relates a story of his own from his youth, when he (Lee David) saved a girl he loved, Cho-hee (Lee Chae-eun), after she slit her wrist in a forest. The various narratives — flashbacks, stories within stories, the modern-day framing, and script ideas — slowly merge in fascinating and confusing ways, reminiscent of such Hong films as Oki’s Movie, Like You Know It All, and Tale of Cinema. Although suicide is a major theme running through all of the stories, Romance Joe is not a sad melodrama; instead, it is an entertaining, thoughtful, if overly long exploration of narrative in film. Romance Joe, which was part of this year’s “New Directors, New Films” series at MoMA and Lincoln Center, is screening for free September 11 at Tribeca Cinemas, kicking off the Korean Cultural Service film series “Gems of Korean Cinema,” which focuses on indie works and continues September 25 with Moon Si-hyun’s Home Sweet Home and October 9 with Kim Joong-hyun’s Choked.

THE FRENCH OLD WAVE: GRAND ILLUSION

Jean Renoir’s GRAND ILLUSION continues its seventy-fifth anniversary celebration as part of Film Forum’s “The French Old Wave” series

GRAND ILLUSION (Jean Renoir, 1937)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Monday, September 10, 5:10
Series continues through September 13
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

If you’ve never seen this remarkable cinematic achievement, prepare to be overwhelmed by Jean Renoir’s antiwar masterpiece. The first foreign film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, Grand Illusion is set in a POW camp during WWI, where everyman pilot Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin), by-the-book Captain de Boieldieu (Pierre Fresnay), lovable Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), and others are being held by the aristocratic Captain von Rauffenstein (an unforgettable Erich von Stroheim). Proclaimed “cinematic public enemy no. 1” by Joseph Goebbels, Grand Illusion takes on anti-Semitism, class structure, and religion in addition to war, a humanist film that is as relevant as ever seventy-five years after its initial release. It will be screening on September 10 at Film Forum as part of “The French Old Wave” in a new 35mm restored print (shown earlier this year at Film Forum), made in honor of the film’s seventy-fifth anniversary. The series continues through September 13 with such classics as Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and Renoir’s The Rules of the Game in addition to double features of Jean Grémillon’s Lumière d’Eté and Le Ciel Est à Vous, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’Assassin Habite au 21 and Quai des Orfèvres, and Grémillon’s Remorques and L’Étrange Monsieur Victor.

SEE IT BIG! THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Cybill Shepherd prepare for adulthood in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, September 9, free with museum admission, 7:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

The summer season of the Museum of the Moving Image “See It Big!” series concludes this weekend with two very different films, both shot by cinematographer Robert Surtees: William Wyler’s glorious Ben-Hur, for which he won his third Oscar, and Peter Bogdanovich’s much more subtle The Last Picture Show, a tender-hearted, poignant portrait of sexual awakening and coming-of-age in a sleepy Texas town. Adapted from the Larry McMurtry novel by the author and the director, the film is set in the early 1950s, focusing on Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms), a teenager who works at the local pool hall with Billy (Timothy’s brother Sam), a simple-minded boy who needs special caring. Sonny’s best friend, Duane Jackson (Oscar-nominated Jeff Bridges), is dating the prettiest girl in school, Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd, in her film debut), who is getting ready to test out the sexual waters, sneaking away on a date with Lester Marlow (Randy Quaid), who takes her to a naked-swimming party in a wealthier suburb of Wichita Falls. Meanwhile, Sonny breaks up with his girlfriend, Charlene Druggs (Sharon Taggart), and becomes drawn to the sad, unhappy Ruth Popper (an Oscar-winning Cloris Leachman), the wife of his football coach (Bill Thurman). The outstanding all-star cast also features Oscar-nominated Ellen Burstyn as Lois, Jacy’s mother; Eileen Brennan as a waitress in the local diner who makes cheeseburgers for Sonny; Clu Gulager as a working man who has a thing for Lois; Frank Marshall, who went on to become a big-time producer, as high school student Tommy Logan; and Oscar winner Ben Johnson as Sam the Lion, the moral center of the town and owner of the pool hall, diner, and movie theater, which shows such films as Father of the Bride and Red River. Surtees shoots The Last Picture Show in a sentimental black-and-white that gives the film an old-fashioned feel, as if it’s a part of Americana that is fading away. Bogdanovich also chose to have no original score, instead populating the tale with country songs by Hank Williams, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Lefty Frizzell, Tony Bennett, and others singing tales of woe. In many ways the film is the flip side of George Lucas’s 1973 hit American Graffiti, which is set ten years later but looks like it’s from another century; it also has a lot in common with François Truffaut’s 1962 classic Jules and Jim.. Nominated for eight Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, The Last Picture Show is an unforgettable slice-of-life drama that will break your heart over and over again.

AMERICAN GAGSTERS — GREAT COMEDY TEAMS: WOODY ALLEN & DIANE KEATON

Woody Allen and Diane Keaton struggle with domestic bliss in ANNIE HALL

BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
September 8-9
Series runs through September 17
212-415-5500
www.bam.org

“We enjoy your films, particularly the early, funny ones,” an alien tells Sandy Bates in Woody Allen’s vastly underrated 1980 Fellini homage, Stardust Memories. Allen stars as Bates, a very serious director being honored at a film festival where everyone raves about his early stuff, much as fans and critics did after the Woodman shocked his public with the Bergmanesque Interiors in 1978. But what early stuff it was, with Allen and real-life partner Diane Keaton teaming up to become one of the greatest comedy duos of them all, right up there with Tracy and Hepburn, Powell and Loy, Martin and Lewis, and Cary Grant and any number of leading ladies. BAMcinématek is honoring Allen and Keaton (as well as all those others) as part of the fabulous series “American Gagsters: Great Comedy Teams,” screening four of their best films this weekend. In 1977’s Annie Hall (Saturday at 2:00 & 6:50), Allen plays Alvy Singer, a Jewish television writer who has fallen in love with the ultimate goy, Annie (a never-better Keaton, whose real name is Diane Hall). As their relationship ebbs and flows, they discuss major spiders, lobsters, sharks, and other creatures while driving through Plutonium and meeting Marshall McLuhan. (Alvy: “What’s the difference? It’s all mental masturbation.” Annie: “Oh, well, now we’re finally getting to a subject you know something about.” Alvy: “Hey, don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.”) In 1973’s Sleeper (Saturday at 4:30 & 9:15), Allen is Miles Monroe, a cryogenically preserved liberal who has woken up two hundred years later to find a very different world as poses as a robot butler for the snooty Luna Schlosser (Keaton), tests out an orgasmotron, and becomes a revolutionary. (Luna: “Oh, I see. You don’t believe in science, and you also don’t believe that political systems work, and you don’t believe in God, huh?” Miles: “Right.” Luna: “So then, what do you believe in?” Miles: “Sex and death — two things that come once in a lifetime . . . but at least after death, you’re not nauseous.”)

Diane Keaton and Woody Allen fight for Mother Russia in intellectual slapstick comedy

In 1979’s Manhattan (Sunday at 2:00 & 6:50), a celebration of Gershwin and New York City, Allen plays Isaac Davis, a forty-two-year-old television writer who starts dating seventeen-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), much to the consternation of the snobby Mary Wilkie (Keaton), who is having an affair with Isaac’s best friend (Michael Murphy). (Mary: “What are you thinking?” Isaac: “I dunno, I was just thinking. There must be something wrong with me, because I’ve never had a relationship with a woman that’s lasted longer than the one between Hitler and Eva Braun.”) And in 1975’s absolutely riotous Love and Death (Sunday at 4:30 & 9:15), a hysterical parody of classic Russian literature, Allen takes on the role of the less-than-heroic Boris Grushenko, who finds himself dueling with a gentleman and going after Napoleon with Sonja (Keaton), the cousin he is madly in love with. (Sonja: “And I want three children.” Boris: “Yes. Yes. One of each.”) Allen went on to make some terrific films with his future partner, Mia Farrow, but it his work with Keaton that cemented his reputation and is likely to be best remembered now, in 2173, and beyond.