Gamera marches into Japan Society for conclusion of “Beyond Godzilla” film series
GLOBUS FILM SERIES
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Saturday, April 8, $13, 4:00 & 7:00
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
Japan Society’s three-weekend, seven-film “Beyond Godzilla: Alternative Futures & Fantasies in Japanese Cinema” Globus Film Series concludes on Saturday, April 8, with two more tokusatsu kaiju eiga (special-effects-heavy monster movies) that are not about that fire-breathing superstar of postwar madness. At 4:00, Kihachi Okamoto (Sword of Doom, Japan’s Longest Day) goes sci-fi with 1978’s socially conscious Blue Christmas, as UFOs land on earth and have an unusual plan. Then, at 7:00, Gamera, who first trashed cities in 1965, returns in the third film in Shusuke Kaneko’s 1990s reboot, Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris, involving a cool cat and special effects by Shinji Higuchi (Shin Godzilla). “Ever since Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Godzilla first rampaged across screens around the world, its title monster has become both Japan’s best-known pop culture export and a universal symbol of mass destruction. But Godzilla has also cast a long, scaly shadow obscuring Japan’s other live-action contributions to the sci-fi/fantasy genre,” guest curator Mark Schilling says in a program note in which he also explains, “I curated a section of classic sci-fi and fantasy films sourced from Toho and elsewhere to show that the Japanese cinematic imagination extended beyond Godzilla in ways entertainingly rich and strange.” The series previously screened such cult classics as The H-Man, Invisible Man, and Latitude Zero (with Joseph Cotten!). On April 28, “Godzilla Legend — Music of Akira Ifukube” will feature Hikashu and guest musicians such as Charan-Po-Rantan performing works by Akira Ifukube, who composed scores for tons of films, including Godzilla, The Burmese Harp, Rodan, 13 Assassins, Frankenstein Conquers the World, King Kong Escapes, and Zatoichi the Fugitive, which Japan Society is showing April 7 in its Monthly Classics series.
On February 19, 1972, during a massive blizzard, thirty-three-year-old jazz trumpeter extraordinaire Lee Morgan was shot to death by his common-law wife, Helen, in Slugs’ Saloon on the Lower East Side. Swedish director, writer, and producer Kasper Collin takes viewers behind the scenes of the tragedy in the sensational documentary I Called Him Morgan. The Philadelphia-born Morgan was a young prodigy, studying with Clifford Brown, playing with Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra when he was eighteen, and joining Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers at twenty. Preferring the term “black classical music” to “jazz,” Morgan was caught up in a lifestyle of fast cars and drugs, ultimately hitting rock bottom until he was rescued by Helen Moore, thirteen years his elder, a farm girl from North Carolina who loved throwing parties in her adopted hometown of New York City and was a beloved fixture in the jazz community. Collin amasses an impressive roster of jazz greats who share their insights, including saxophonists Wayne Shorter, Bennie Maupin, and Billy Harper, drummers Albert “Tootie” Heath and Charli Persip, and bassists Larry Ridley, Jymie Merritt, and Paul West, along with Morgan neighbor Ron St. Clair, Helen’s son Al Harrison, and Morgan’s very close friend, Judith Johnson, many of whom are going on the record for the first time. “There was never no doubt in anybody’s mind: Lee was gonna be a star, Persip remembers. “They cared about each other. They loved each other,” Maupin says about Lee and Helen. There are also rare audio clips from an interview British writer and photographer Val Wilmer conducted with Morgan in October 1971 in Lee and Helen’s Bronx apartment. The film is anchored by a remarkable interview Helen gave writer, teacher, and jazz radio announcer Larry Reni Thomas in February 1996, a month before she died. “I will not sit here and tell you that I was so nice, because I was not,” she tells Thomas, speaking often in broken phrases. “One of the . . . will cut you. I was sharp. Yeah . . . I had to be. And I looked out for me.” It all culminates in a spellbinding, detailed account of the murder itself, told by numerous eyewitnesses with “Stagger Lee”-like swagger.
