this week in film and television

MIA HANSEN-LØVE SELECTS

Mia Hansen-Løve is curating an inspirational series at Metrograph (photo by Judicaël Perrin)

MIA HANSEN-LØVE SELECTS
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
November 5-13
212-660-0312
nyc.metrograph.com

“Filmmaking is a perpetual questioning of existence. What is beauty? Why am I living? And I need that, I think, perhaps because of being the daughter of two philosophy teachers,” French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve told the Guardian in 2016. A critics darling and regular award winner for her intimate tales of family drama and romantic love (Goodbye First Love, The Father of My Children, Things to Come), often with semiautobiographical elements involving her DJ brother, her philosophy professor parents, and her long relationship with former husband Olivier Assayas, she is ready to make a big jump with her latest film and first in English, Bergman Island, in which a pair of filmmakers (Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth) seek inspiration on Fårö Island, where Ingmar Bergman lived and made some of his finest films.

In conjunction with the film’s release, she is curating a program at Metrograph, “Mia Hansen-Løve Selects,” running November 5-13, consisting of six films that had an impact on her, in addition to her debut. Earlier this year, for a similar series at BAMPFA in California, she chose Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumière, Gérard Blain’s The Pelican, Bo Widerberg’s Adalen 31, and Éric Rohmer’s Summer. Her Metrograph lineup is similarly diverse: Bergman actor Victor Sjöström’s 1928 silent classic, The Wind; indie favorite Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, in which Michelle Williams portrays a homeless woman on the move with her dog; Rohmer’s A Tale of Winter, about a single mother searching for companionship; Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur, a unique take on happiness; Edward Yang’s epic four-hour A Brighter Summer Day, about teen angst in Taiwan; and Hou’s dizzying, swirling Millennium Mambo, starring a resplendent performance by Shu Qi. The series is anchored by Hansen-Løve’s 2007 debut feature, All Is Forgiven, being shown November 5-18 (and available on demand), about a family in crisis because of drug addiction. Below are select reviews.

Letty Mason (Lillian Gish) is being driven crazy by internal and external sources in The Wind

THE WIND (Victor Sjöström, 1928)
Metrograph
Friday, November 5, and Sunday, November 7, noon
nyc.metrograph.com

Victor Sjöström’s 1928 now-classic silent film The Wind stars Lillian Gish as Letty Mason, a young woman moving from Virginia to Texas to live with her cousin Beverly (Edward Earle). Traveling from the cultured, civilized East to what was still the wild West, the uncertain Letty must confront the fierceness of nature head-on — both human nature and the harsh natural environment. On the train, she is wooed by cattleman Wirt Roddy (Montagu Love), but her fears grow as she first sees the vicious wind howling outside the train window the closer she gets to her destination. Once in Sweetwater, she is picked up by her cousin’s neighbors, the handsome Lige Hightower (Lars Hanson) and his goofy sidekick, Sourdough (William Orlamond). Both men take a quick liking to Letty, who seems most attracted to Wirt. Soon Beverly’s wife, Cora (Dorothy Cumming, in her next-to-last film before retiring), becomes jealous of Letty’s closeness with her husband and kids and kicks her out, leaving a desperate Letty to make choices she might not be ready for as the wind outside becomes fiercer and ever-more dangerous.

Letty Mason (Lillian Gish) and Lige Hightower (Lars Hanson) have some tough decisions to make in Victor Sjöström’s silent classic

The Wind is a tour de force for Gish in her last silent movie, not only because of her emotionally gripping portrayal of Letty, but because she put the entire production together, obtaining the rights to the novel by Dorothy Scarborough, hiring the Swedish director and star Hanson, and arguing over the ending with the producers and Irving Thalberg. (Unfortunately, she lost on that account, just about the only thing that did not go the way she wanted.)

Sjöström (The Phantom Carriage, The Divine Woman), who played Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and cinematographer John Arnold create some dazzling effects as a twister threatens and Letty battles both inside and outside; she is regularly shot from the side, at the door of the shack where she lives, not knowing if she’d be safer inside or outside as the wind and sand blast over her. The film, an early look at climate change, was shot in the Mojave Desert in difficult circumstances; to get the wind to swirl, the crew used propellers from eight airplanes. Dialogue is sparse, and the story is told primarily in taut visuals.

François (Jean-Claude Drouot) tries to convince Thérèse (Claire Drouot, his real-life wife), that he has plenty of happiness to spread around in Le Bonheur

LE BONHEUR (HAPPINESS) (Agnès Varda, 1965)
Metrograph
Friday, November 5, and Monday, November 8, 6:45
nyc.metrograph.com

In 1965, French Nouvelle Vague auteur Agnès Varda said about her third film, Le Bonheur, which translates as Happiness: “Happiness is mistaken sadness, and the film will be subversive in its great sweetness. It will be a beautiful summer fruit with a worm inside. Happiness adds up; torment does too.” That is all true more than fifty years later, as the film still invites divided reaction from critics. “Miss Varda’s dissection of amour, as French as any of Collette’s works, is strikingly adult and unembarrassed in its depiction of the variety of love, but it is as illogical as a child’s dream,” A. H. Weiler wrote in the New York Times in May 1966. “Her ‘Happiness,’ a seeming idyll sheathed in irony, is obvious and tender, irresponsible and shocking and continuously provocative.” All these decades later, the brief eighty-minute film is all that and more, save for the claim that it is illogical. In a patriarchal society, it actually makes perfect, though infuriating, sense.

François and Émilie (Marie-France Boyer) seek out their own happiness in Nouvelle Vague classic

French television star Jean-Claude Drouot (Thierry La Fronde) stars as the handsome François, who is leading an idyllic life with his beautiful wife, Thérèse (Claire Drouot), and their delightful kids, Pierrot (Olivier Drouot) and Gisou (Sandrine Drouot), in the small, tight-knit Parisian suburb of Fontenay. While away on a job, François meets the beautiful Émilie (Marie-France Boyer), a postal clerk who connects him to his wife via long-distance telephone, flirting with him although she knows he is happily married. And despite being happily married, François returns the flirtation, offering to help with her shelves when she moves into an apartment in Fontenay. Both François and Émilie believe that there is more than enough happiness to go around for everyone, without any complications. “Be happy too, don’t worry,” Émilie tells him. “I’m free, happy, and you’re not the first,” to which he soon adds, “Such happiness!” And it turns out that even tragedy won’t put a stop to the happiness, in a plot point that angered, disappointed, confused, and upset many critics as well as the audience but is key to Varda’s modern-day fairy tale.

The beauty of nature plays a key role in Le Bonheur

Le Bonheur is Varda’s first film in color, and she seems to have been heavily influenced by her husband, Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), bathing the film in stunning hues that mimic Impressionist paintings, particularly the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, in a series of picnics and flower-filled vases. In a sly nod, at one point a black-and-white television is playing the 1959 film Le Déjeuner Sur L’herbe (“Picnic on the Grass”), which was directed by Jean Renoir, one of Auguste’s sons, and also deals with sex, passion, procreation, and nature. Le Bonheur also features numerous scenes that dissolve out in singular blocks of color that take over the entire screen. Cinematographers Claude Beausoleil and Jean Rabier shoot the film as if it takes place in a candy-colored Garden of Eden, all set to the music of Mozart, performed by Jean-Michel Defaye. Varda doesn’t allow any detail to get away from her; even the protagonists’ jobs are critical to the story: François is a carpenter who helps builds new lives for people; Thérèse is a seamstress who is in the midst of making a wedding gown; and Émilie works in the post office, an intermediary for keeping people together. As a final touch, François, who represents aspects of France as a nation under Charles de Gaulle, and his family are played by the actual Drouot clan: Jean-Claude and Claire are married in real life (and still are husband and wife after more than fifty years), and Olivier and Sandrine are their actual children, so Le Bonheur ends up being a family affair in more ways than one.

KEYBOARD FANTASIES

Beverly Glenn-Copeland discusses his life and career in Keyboard Fantasies

KEYBOARD FANTASIES (Posy Dixon, 2021)
Roxy Cinema Tribeca
2 Sixth Ave.
Opens Friday, October 29
www.roxycinematribeca.com
www.keyboardfantasies.movie

“I just lived my life,” Philadelphia-born Canadian composer and Black trans activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland says in the documentary Keyboard Fantasies, opening October 29 at the Roxy in Tribeca. The seventy-minute film follows the now-seventy-seven-year-old musician as he plays several shows after having been rediscovered in 2015, which led to the rerelease of his 1986 album, Keyboard Fantasies, a work that melds ambient, jazz, classical, folk, world, and New Age sounds in a way that was ahead of its time. Obsessed with Glenn-Copeland’s music, director Posy Dixon became Skype friends with him and ended up making her debut feature film.

Dixon cuts back and forth between live performances and Glenn-Copeland sitting on a chair in his house, discussing his life, accompanied by family photographs and home movies. Both of his parents were pianists; when his mother became a Quaker, she decided that Glenn-Copeland, then known as Beverly, needed to be fixed. “Her protective instinct was that I should be as normal as possible. Well, I wasn’t like that,” he says.

Beverly Glenn-Copeland basks in his rediscovery in Keyboard Fantasies

Born in 1944, Glenn-Copeland went to McGill University in Canada, where he felt targeted and isolated, unhappy in his body. “I was having to fight quite a lot to be able to be just who I was,” he recalls. He left school, bought a guitar, and started writing music. It took decades before he realized he was trans, including a disastrous stint as a lesbian and the parental threat of electroshock therapy. In 2016, he got an email from a Japanese collector, requesting copies of Keyboard Fantasies. It wasn’t long before Glenn-Copeland was out on the road, playing gigs with the young band Indigo Rising, consisting of Jeremy Costello, Carlie Howell, Kurt Inder, Nick Dourado, and Bianca Palmer, who are seen in the film hanging out with him and performing onstage together. “He’s completely out of time and place always,” Dourado says affectionately.

Dixon travels with Glenn-Copeland and Indigo Rising to the Scribe Center in Philly, the Barbican Centre and Café Oto in London, TivoliVredenburg and Le Guess Who? in the Netherlands, the Jam Factory in Toronto, and other venues, where he plays such meditative songs as “Sunset Village,” “Complainin’ Blues,” “Color of Anyhow,” “Ever Anew,” “Let Us Dance,” “La Vita,” and “Wade in the Water.” (The last tune is the one Glenn-Copeland sings on an eighty-four-foot diaphanous curtain hanging from the top of the Guggenheim Museum in the recent exhibition “Wu Tsang: Anthem.”)

The documentary focuses on Glenn-Copeland’s search for personal identity and his music career; there are no experts or critics chiming in, we don’t get to meet his wife, Elizabeth Paddon, and he doesn’t talk about adding “Copeland” to his name in honor of American composer Aaron Copland. In addition, the film was made before Glenn-Copeland had to cancel a tour because of the pandemic lockdown just as his career was being fully revived and he and Paddon had to resort to a GoFundMe page to avoid homelessness.

But it’s all part of his journey. “I don’t believe there’s any mistakes in our lives,” he says. The positivity of Glenn-Copeland’s outlook is infectious, even when it comes to a bad joke that appears after the closing credits.

BULLETPROOF

Bulletproof reveals the capitalization and marketing of school shootings (photo © Emily Topper)

BULLETPROOF (Todd Chandler, 2020)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, October 29
212-660-0312
nyc.metrograph.com

There’s a powerful moment near the end of Todd Chandler’s Bulletproof that I won’t soon forget. It takes place at a shooting range, where an employee is sweeping up hundreds of spent shells from guns fired by teachers and parents learning how to defend themselves in the event of a school shooting. The casings evoke the many horrific deaths of children around the country who’ve been killed just because they went to class that day, their stories swept away as the next massacre awaits.

Bulletproof sounds like a thriller, and in many ways it is. When I was a kid, we were taught to duck and cover, hiding under our desks or in the halls to survive a nuclear threat that, fortunately, never came to fruition. But today’s children face a far greater danger from school shootings, although one person in the film does note that they are more likely to die in an airplane crash than by a bullet in school. Chandler (Flood Tide, A Debtors’ Prison) and cinematographer Emily Topper (After Tiller, The Departure) travel to schools in Missouri, Texas, Chicago, Pittsburgh, California, Colorado, and New York, filming shooter drills, local hearings, and presentations from safety officers that use scare tactics and fear to convince districts they need to hire armed security guards and give the teachers guns. “The threat always comes from inside,” a Texas principal says. Another man explains, “Some people will say, ‘That’s just some kid playing,’ but the problem is, we can’t take that risk anymore.” Chandler intercuts scenes of kids just being kids, learning math, going to homecoming, and kicking a ball around.

The Texas principal boasts of having spent forty thousand dollars on twenty-two AR-15s for nineteen security officers. A Pittsburgh policeman is met with resistance when he blames school shootings on prescription SSRIs. Teachers play a life-size video game placing them in the middle of a mass shooting in a gym. A man shows off an all-pervasive surveillance system. A young Bay Area tech worker postpones getting her Master’s and instead starts making bulletproof Kevlar Wonder Hoodies. A school safety convention in Las Vegas reveals capitalism at its best as companies push bulletproof whiteboards and desks, safety lockers displayed in a colorful toylike diorama, and an electronic flashbang that can be used as a distraction device. They are all marketing to panic and monetizing trauma, but you can still take a selfie with a pair of scantily clad women in blue sequins.

Chandler doesn’t speak with any talking-head experts or pundits; instead, Bulletproof is more of a fly-on-the-wall Maysles-like documentary in which the audience gets more than a peek at how the plague of school shootings is being dealt with in these local communities. There are no statistics, no news reports, no debates over guns and the NRA; none of the participants in the film are identified, primarily because they are us, and we are them. America is in crisis, and, as Chandler shows, much of America has gone into crisis mode, to the extreme, when it comes to addressing school shootings, of which, according to CNN, there have been 180 since 2009, with 365 victims.

Are any of these security measures going to work? Chandler might not answer that question directly, but the image of a broom sweeping shell casings like so many dead bodies makes a strong point.

Bulletproof opens October 29 at Metrograph, with Chandler on hand for Q&As at the 8:30 screening on Friday night and the 7:00 show on November 1, when he will be joined by fellow documentarian Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson, Dick Johnson Is Dead).

SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

Nazi leader Albert Speer tries to whitewash history in Speer Goes to Hollywood

SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD (Vanessa Lapa, 2021)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, October 29
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
speergoestohollywood.com

In 2014, Belgium-born, Israel-based documentarian Vanessa Lapa made her feature-length debut with The Decent One, in which she painted a frightening portrait of Heinrich Himmler, using the private diary of the Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (Himmler’s official title). She has now followed that film with Speer Goes to Hollywood, which incorporates archival footage from the Nuremberg trials and clips from propaganda films accompanying forty hours of recordings made in 1971 by up-and-coming British screenwriter Andrew Birkin as he worked with convicted Nazi leader Albert Speer, known as Hitler’s Architect, collaborating on a screenplay for Paramount Pictures based on the former Reichsminister of Munitions’ bestselling memoir, Inside the Third Reich.

Birkin, the brother of model and actress Jane Birkin and whose mentors include Stanley Kubrick and Carol Reed, met with Speer in the latter’s country home in Heidelberg in the winter of 1971. Birkin kept the tape rolling as he and Speer carefully reviewed every scene in the screenplay, as Speer tries to whitewash many of the more outrageous and gruesome details regarding his culpability in the Nazis’ reign of terror while Birkin tries to not let him off the hook.

“I would be careful,” Reed (The Third Man, Oliver!) warns Birkin over the phone after reviewing the first draft of the script. “You can’t build without him knowing. The man holds his mind blank to that. This is not a sweet man.”

Tall and elegant, Speer seizes control of the narrative again and again, claiming to be a dreamer and making sure he is seen with his dog, as if he’s just a normal guy. “I want a private life too,” he opines. He considers war “an adventure” and the Nazi regime “just good fun” to downplay the piles of murdered bodies the Third Reich left in its wake. He refers to the tortured prisoners of war in factories and the concentration camps as workmen and laborers, making excuses that argue that the negative aspects of what the Nazis did have been exaggerated. “I did not know what crimes I’m committing,” he claims. He explains that the “camps were necessary” and blames his Labor Department head, Fritz Sauckel, for the mistreatment of the Jews and other captives under his watch. “I was not responsible for those things. It was him,” he points out.

All the while, Birkin attempts to convince himself that he is doing the right thing by sharing Speer’s story on film. “I’ve been saying all along that I find it easy to identify myself with you,” he tells Speer. “The only point where I think I would have opted out would have been if I had been present or if I witnessed a scene that involved children being carted off. Can you ever remember a situation where you either read about, or more probably heard about, children being separated up or families being torn apart? Anything. Can you ever remember anything that happened? Even if, at the time, you were able to rationalize it?” Speer says no, “But . . . Yes, well, but you know, small things are now seen as the center of a thing. But I’m sorry. It would be wrong to say now I had a sentimental reaction or so. Your idea of the film and of my person that I had any reaction is wrong.”

Speer talks about Himmler, Hermann Göring, and Joseph Goebbels and admits to being one of Hitler’s best friends — and still claims he did not know what was going on despite his heavy involvement with the Mathausen camp and his visit to Auschwitz. “Indirectly, I knew from Hitler that he was planning to annihilate the Jewish people. He said it quite often. But I had no direct knowledge until ’44.” Seeking to garner some sympathy, he says, “If ever I can get rid of the guilt, and quite often I was thinking that I never shall get rid of it, that this burden will ever last with me.”

Albert Speer is profiled in new documentary built around revelatory footage

Birkin might want to give Speer the benefit of the doubt to some degree, but it’s hard for viewers to see anything but a twisted man who lacks empathy and compassion for his fellow human being, lording his sense of superiority over all others, trying to skirt his responsibilities during the war and rewrite history — a project that cannot help but make one reflect on the way America is these days when it comes to slavery, remembering the Holocaust, removing public statues of the founding fathers, tearing apart immigrant families at the border, and changing textbooks to present partisan views of the nation’s past.

Explaining one of Kubrick’s arguments, Birkin (The Name of the Rose, The Cement Garden) says the director told him, “I would find it very difficult to do the film if your character, the Speer in the film, you still made out that he didn’t know what was going on.” Speer just wanted a normal life, reveling in his being called “the good Nazi,” but as Lapa’s film shows, there is not a whole lot of good in him.

Winner of the Israeli Oscar for Best Documentary, Speer Goes to Hollywood is a chilling work that gets into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s most terrifying figures. Lapa and producer Tomer Eliav will be at Film Forum for the 7:00 shows on October 29 and 30 for Q&As that will dig even deeper into this extraordinary story.

CONGO WEEK: CONGO IN HARLEM 13

Who: Lebert Sandy Bethune, Herb Boyd, Milton Allimadi, Lubangi Muniania, more
What: Thirteenth annual Congo in Harlem festival
Where: Maysles Documentary Center, 343 Lenox Ave. / Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th and 128th Sts.
When: Saturday, October 23, and Sunday, October 24, $12 (virtual screenings free)
Why: The Maysles Documentary Center’s thirteenth annual Congo in Harlem festival, part of Congo Week, concludes its hybrid presentation this weekend with a trio of in-person screenings, two of which are followed by live discussions. On October 23 at 7:30, Maysles will show Bill Stephens’s raw, recently rediscovered, untranslated, and unfinished 1971 film, Congo Oyé, made in collaboration with Chris Marker, Paul and Carole Roussopoulas, and Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, consisting of forty-five minutes of remarkable footage of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s visit to Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo. At the same time, the Harlem-based theater will screen Lebert Bethune and John Taylor’s 1966 doc, Malcolm X: Struggle for Freedom, with Bethune, scholar and activist Herb Boyd, and journalist Milton Allimadi on hand to talk about the film, which was shot in Paris shortly before the controversial leader’s assassination.

Bill Stephens’s recently rediscovered Congo Oyé, is part of Maysles Documentary Center’s Congo in Harlem festival

On October 24 at 4:00, Congolese art educator Lubangi Muniania will moderate a discussion after a screening of Mark Kidel’s 1989 film, New York: Secret African City, in which scholar Robert Farris Thompson, who has been writing and teaching about African art and culture since 1958, shares his iconographic studies of the diaspora in New York, beginning with a trip across the Brooklyn Bridge in which Thompson explains, “We’re undergoing a ritual moment because we’re leaving Wall Street, we’re leaving Madison Avenue, we’re leaving white New York, and we’re entering one of the blackest of the cultural segments of New York.” Tickets to the events are $12 each. In addition, free virtual screenings continue through October 24 of Jihan El-Tahri’s L’Afrique en Morceaux (Africa in Pieces), Douglas Ntimasiemi and Raffi Aghekian’s Kinshasa Mboka Té (Kinshasa Wicked Land), Mathieu Roy’s Les Creuseurs (The Diggers), Kidel’s Pygmies in Paris, Sammy Baloji and David Bernatchez’s Rumba Rules: New Genealogies, Moimi Wezam’s Zero, and the above-mentioned works as well as more than a dozen shorts.

SONGS FOR ’DRELLA

SONGS FOR ’DRELLA (Ed Lachman, 1990)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
October 22-27
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

In December 1989, Velvet Underground cofounders John Cale and Lou Reed took the stage at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House and performed a song cycle in honor of Andy Warhol, who had played a pivotal role in the group’s success. The Pittsburgh-born Pop artist had died in February 1987 at the age of fifty-eight; although Cale and Reed had had a long falling-out, they reunited at Warhol’s funeral at the suggestion of artist Julian Schnabel. Commissioned by BAM and St. Ann’s, Songs for ’Drella — named after one of Warhol’s nicknames, a combination of Dracula and Cinderella — was released as a concert film and recorded for an album. The work is filled with factual details and anecdotes of Warhol’s life and career, from his relationship with his mother to his years at the Factory, from his 1967 shooting at the hands of Valerie Solanis to his dedication to his craft.

Directed, photographed, and produced by Ed Lachman, the two-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer of such films as Desperately Seeking Susan, Mississippi Masala, Far from Heaven, and Carol, the concert movie has just undergone a 4K restoration supervised by Lachman that premiered at the New York Film Festival a few weeks ago and is now running October 22-27 at Film Forum, with Lachman participating in Q&As following the 5:45 screenings on October 22, 23, and 24. (Producer Carolyn Hepburn will introduce the 5:45 show on October 27.) Songs for ’Drella is an intimate portrait not only of Warhol but of Cale and Reed, who sit across from each other onstage, Cale on the left, playing keyboards and violin, Reed on the right on guitars. There is no between-song patter or introductions; they just play the music as Robert Wierzel’s lighting shifts from black-and-white to splashes of blue and red. Photos of Warhol and some of his works (Electric Chair, Mona Lisa, Gun) are occasionally projected onto a screen on the back wall.

“When you’re growing up in a small town / Bad skin, bad eyes — gay and fatty / People look at you funny / When you’re in a small town / My father worked in construction / It’s not something for which I’m suited / Oh — what is something for which you are suited? / Getting out of here,” Reed sings on the opener, “Smalltown.” Cale and Reed share an infectious smile before “Style It Takes,” in which Cale sings, “I’ve got a Brillo box and I say it’s art / It’s the same one you can buy at any supermarket / ’Cause I’ve got the style it takes / And you’ve got the people it takes / This is a rock group called the Velvet Underground / I show movies of them / Do you like their sound / ’Cause they have a style that grates and I have art to make.”

John Cale and Lou Reed reunited to honor Andy Warhol in Songs for ’Drella

Cale and Reed reflect more on their association with Warhol in “A Dream.” Cale sings as Warhol, “And seeing John made me think of the Velvets / And I had been thinking about them / when I was on St. Marks Place / going to that new gallery those sweet new kids have opened / But they thought I was old / And then I saw the old DOM / the old club where we did our first shows / It was so great / And I don’t understand about that Velvets first album / I mean, I did the cover / and I was the producer / and I always see it repackaged / and I’ve never gotten a penny from it / How could that be / I should call Henry / But it was good seeing John / I did a cover for him / but I did it in black and white and he changed it to color / It would have been worth more if he’d left it my way / But you can never tell anybody anything / I’ve learned that.”

The song later turns the focus on Reed, recalling, “And then I saw Lou / I’m so mad at him / Lou Reed got married and didn’t invite me / I mean, is it because he thought I’d bring too many people? / I don’t get it / He could have at least called / I mean, he’s doing so great / Why doesn’t he call me? / I saw him at the MTV show / and he was one row away and he didn’t even say hello / I don’t get it / You know I hate Lou / I really do / He won’t even hire us for his videos / And I was so proud of him.”

Reed does say hello — and goodbye — on the closer, “Hello It’s Me.” With Cale on violin, Reed stands up with his guitar and fondly sings, “Oh well, now, Andy — I guess we’ve got to go / I wish some way somehow you like this little show / I know it’s late in coming / But it’s the only way I know / Hello, it’s me / Goodnight, Andy / Goodbye, Andy.”

It’s a tender way to end a beautiful performance, but Lachman has added a special treat after the credits, with one final anecdote and the original trailer he made for Reed’s 1974 song cycle, Berlin. In addition, Songs for ’Drella is an excellent companion piece for the new Todd Haynes documentary, The Velvet Underground, which is also screening at Film Forum.

GET CRAZY

Malcolm McDowell gets plenty crazy as rock god Reggie Wanker in Allan Arkush’s Get Crazy

GET CRAZY (Allan Arkush, 1983)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Friday, October 22, 3:30
Series runs through October 24
212-660-0312
nyc.metrograph.com

One of the most underrated, little-seen rock-and-roll movies ever made, Get Crazy should be a cult classic. Directed by Allan (Rock ‘n’ Roll High School) Arkush, Get Crazy evokes the closing of the Fillmore East as Neil Allen (Daniel Stern) and Willy Loman (Gail Edwards) help put together a New Year’s Eve farewell concert for the beloved Saturn Theater, which the conniving Colin Beverly (Ed Begley Jr.) is trying to steal out from under Max Wolfe (Allen Garfield). Among the special guests at the show are Bill Henderson as the Muddy Waters clone King Blues, Captain Cloud (Howard Kaylan of the Turtles) and the Rainbow Telegraph, and Nada (Kid Creole Coconut Lori Eastside) with Piggy (Lee Ving of Fear), but the movie is stolen by Malcolm McDowell as the Mick Jagger ripoff Reggie Wanker, who literally lets his member do the talking, and Lou Reed as the Dylan/Donovan homage Auden, a folksinger desperate to write a tune before the show, so he spends most of the film riding around in a cab, rambling on about whatever is right in front of him. And be sure to keep an eye out for John Densmore, Fabian, Bobby Sherman, Clint Howard, Linnea Quigley, and Paul Bartel. In addition to the live numbers, the soundtrack includes songs by Sparks, Marshall Crenshaw, the Ramones, and Reed, whose awesome “Little Sister” plays over the closing credits.

Extremely silly but still loads of fun, Get Crazy is screening October 22 at 3:30 at Metrograph in the well-titled party series “Get Crazy,” which continues through October 24 with Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water, Nima Nourizadeh’s Project X, and Doug Liman’s Go.