Life is about to get a whole lot creepier for the Freeling family in POLTERGEIST
POLTERGEIST (Tobe Hooper, 1982)
Tompkins Square Park
500 East Ninth St. between Aves. A & B
Thursday, August 16, free, sundown
www.filmsintompkins2012.com
When psychic Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein) says “Don’t go into the light,” she means it in more ways than one, so be sure to take heed when Tobe Hooper’s classic modern ghost story screens for free in tree-lined Tompkins Square Park on August 16. Inspired by the 1962 Twilight Zone episode “Little Girl Lost,” Poltergeist, which also features the significant involvement of cowriter and producer Steven Spielberg, has all the elements in all the right places to just plain scare the hell out of you. Shortly after Steven (Craig T. Nelson) and Diane (JoBeth Williams) Freeling move into their new home in the planned California community of Cuesta Verde, things start getting very creepy, especially when youngest daughter Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) announces, “They’re here,” then disappears into the television. Meanwhile, older sister Dana (Dominique Dunne) freaks out, and brother Robbie (Oliver Robins) has a bit of a problem with a clown doll and a tree branch. Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Lifeforce) lets the tension build slowly until it eventually explodes in a no-holds-barred ending that will have you digging into the cuticles of whoever is sitting next to you. And yes, those skeletons are real human bones, not replicas. The success of Poltergeist led to two sequels, a television series, and, unfortunately, a possible remake, but there’s nothing quite like the original, a deviously delicious frightfest that continues to send shivers down the spine no matter how often one sees it. And yes, Steven’s boss is indeed played by the Pathmark man (James Karen). Sadly — some say the result of a curse — O’Rourke died in 1988 at the age of twelve, and Dunne, the daughter of writer Dominick Dunne, was murdered by a former boyfriend in 1982 when she was just twenty-two. The Tompkins Square Park screening will be preceded by live music from East Village African rock group Timbila.
Writer, director, poet, photographer, editor, graphic designer, and painter Abbas Kiarostami has been one of Iran’s leading filmmakers for nearly forty years, compiling a resume that includes such important international films as Under the Olive Trees (1994), Taste of Cherry (1997), and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). Certified Copy is his first feature made outside of his home country, a dreadfully boring and annoying art-infused romantic comedy set in Italy. Juliette Binoche was named Best Actress at Cannes this year for her starring role as an unnamed single mother and antiques dealer who is obsessed with English author James Miller’s (British opera star William Shimell) book on the history and meaning of art replicas, Certified Copy. Inexplicably, the two strangers are soon on a bizarre sort-of date, driving through Tuscany and becoming involved in a series of vignettes about love and marriage, literature and art, and other topics. Both characters are seriously flawed and emotionally unstable in ways that make them unattractive to watch, especially in obvious set-ups that either go nowhere or exactly where you think they’re going. While Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke made the somewhat similar Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), in which two strangers from different countries spend a day together (but mostly by themselves), the sexual tension and excitement always building, Certified Copy is more reminiscent of Hans Canova’s ridiculous Conversations with Other Women (2005), in which Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter star as wedding guests with a past whom viewers can’t wait to just shut up and get off the screen. Don’t let the supposed adult dialogue of Certified Copy fool you into thinking it’s an intelligent, mature look at believable relationships; instead, it feels like a staid copy of other, better films you think you’ve seen but can’t remember — and won’t care. Certified Copy is screening on August 15 as part of Socrates Sculpture Park’s fourteenth annual free Outdoor Cinema summer series, with that night’s focus on France and Italy; in addition to the film, there will be live music and/or dance and local regional cuisine.
Nearly fifty years after Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri won the Special Jury Award at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, Takashi Miike’s magnificent 2011 remake was also entered into competition at the prestigious French event. During peaceful times in 1634 Edo, a masterless samurai named Hanshiro Tsukumo (Kabuki star Ebizo Ichikawa) comes to the Lyi clan, requesting permission to commit seppuku in the estate’s courtyard, seeking an honorable death. But clan retainer Kageyu Saito (Kōji Yakusho) and his right-hand man, Hikokuro Omodaka (Munetaka Aoki), believe he might be yet another penniless samurai using a suicide bluff in order to get either a job or money. Trying to discover if the man is serious about wanting to commit hara-kiri, the retainer tells him the horrific story of a young samurai named Motome Chijiiwa (Eita) who requested the same thing two months before. But soon Hanshiro has his own story to tell, one that turns everything around in surprising ways. Miike, who has directed more than eighty movies across a multitude of genres during his twenty-two-year career, including such masterworks as Audition, Ichi the Killer, and Thirteen Assassins, has made his most emotional, compassionate film yet with Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai. Ichikawa, taking on the role played in the original by Tatsuya Nakadai, is brilliant as Hanshiro, a deeply thoughtful samurai with a fierce dedication to honor and loyalty. As he stares into Yakusho’s eyes, the tension can be cut with a steel sword. Miike and cinematographer Nobuyasu Kita shot the film in 3D, but they chose not to get gimmicky with the effects, just making the film they wanted to as if it were in regular 2D. “There was no change to my approach other than I was able to go brag to the director shooting at the studio next door and say, ‘Huh? Yours is flat and level? Ours is bumpy and convexo-concave,’” Miike explains in the press notes. Although he adds, “I definitely anticipate making more 3D movies. Next, if I have the chance, I want to have things that shouldn’t come out of our bodies be hurled at the audience.” The 3D adds a beautiful depth to Akira Sakamoto and Kazuto Kagoo’s gorgeous sets, which are enhanced by Yuji Hayashida’s rich art direction, bathed in deep black, white, gray, and red. The 3D also makes it easier to read the subtitles, which pop off the screen, along with the snow. Hara-Kiri might be a thinking person’s samurai movie, but it is still a Miike film, so it also features one of the most brutal suicides ever depicted on celluloid, and it ends with one helluva fight scene.
Robert Mitchum stars in Charles Laughton’s lurid story of traveling preacher/con man/murderer Harry Powell, who has the word “love” tattooed on one set of knuckles and “hate” on the other. While in prison, Powell bunks with Ben Harper (Peter Graves), who got caught stealing $10,000 — but the only person who knows where the money is is Ben’s young son, John (Billy Chapin). When Preacher is released from jail, he shows up on the Harpers’ doorstep, ready to woo the widow Willa (Shelley Winters) — and get his hands on the money any way he can, including torturing John and his sister, Ruby (Gloria Castillo). Laughton’s only directorial effort is seriously flawed — the scenes in the beginning and end with Lillian Gish are wholly unnecessary and detract from the overall mood. Stanley Cortez’s cinematography is outstanding, featuring his unique use of shadows, the battle between light and dark (which plays off of several themes: old versus young, rich versus poor, good versus evil, and men versus women), and some marvelous silhouettes. The Night of the Hunter is screening August 11 at 8:00 as part of the MoMA film series “Unaccompanied Minors: Views of Youth in Films from the Collection,” being held in conjunction with the new exhibit “Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000.” Running through August 14, the festival includes such other films about childhood as William A. Wellman’s Frisco Jenny, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, and David D. Williams’s Thirteen.