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.
