Screen Picks



Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

by Sam Adams

The Eyes Have It: The Films of Elizabeth Taylor (June 24-29, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700) Liz Taylor is hardly the silver screen’s greatest actress, and I doubt even her greatest fans labor under the illusion that she is. What makes Liz an icon is her inability to be other than she is; she reflects back your own knowledge of her complicated, juicy, turbulent life. (Well, that and the fact that she’s a knockout.) Taylor is pure stardom, and if camp hadn’t already existed, it would have had to have been invented to explain her appeal. You never really believe she’s Cleopatra, but it doesn’t matter, because she’s La Liz. The series includes National Velvet (June 24, 4 p.m.), a brand-new 35mm print of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (June 25, 6:30 p.m.; June 28, 9:30 p.m.), A Place in the Sun (June 27, 7 p.m.), Suddenly, Last Summer (June 27, 9:15 p.m.), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (June 28, 7 p.m.) and Giant (June 29, 7 p.m.). Also included is an outdoor screening of Cleopatra in Rittenhouse Square on June 24 at 8:45 p.m., presented by the organizers of the Marian Anderson Award, which Taylor will be in town to accept (although she’s not planning to drop by the Prince).

Wallace and Gromit If you have small children, you’re probably already familiar with — and quite possibly sick of — Nick Park’s claymated inventor and dog, the star of the animated shorts A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave. But if you’re not, and if you like what you see in Chicken Run (co-directed by Park), you should hightail it to your local video emporium posthaste. Grand Day isn’t as tightly wound as its offspring, and the clay figures sometimes look slightly smudged, without the hard shininess they acquired later on. (It’s also the only one of the series not to win an Oscar; it lost to Park’s Creature Comforts.) With The Wrong Trousers, hints of noir start to appear, from the looming monster-movie titles to its marvelously absurd plot, which involves a penguin on the run from the law and a rather unorthodox jewel heist. (Think The Killing with a penguin in the Sterling Hayden role.) A Close Shave is more madcap adventure, with W&G trying to bust an illegal sheep rustling ring. These last two are both so utterly delightful, so rife with bigfoot ideas and miniscule details (as when Gromit reads a newspaper whose headline is "Dog reads newspaper"), it’s impossible to distinguish between them, so better see all three, just to be safe. On video the shorts are available individually ($9.98) or as a boxed set ($24.98), and a single DVD ($29.98) collects all three, several (very) early Park shorts and excerpts from a making-of featurette. Also available (if not easy to find) is Aardman Animations ($29.99), which pairs Creature Comforts with several other Aardman delights.

P.O.V.: La Boda (Tue., June 27, 10 p.m., PBS stations) Hannah Weyer follows a family of Mexican-American migrant workers in the week before 22-year-old Elizabeth’s wedding. Like Weyer’s fictional Arresting Gena, La Boda has an annoying shapelessness to it which is no doubt supposed to pass for "realism," but when you watch Elizabeth and her mother argue for several minutes about the table decorations for the wedding reception — and that in an unwavering, poorly framed single shot — it’s far more tedious than enlightening. Still, Elizabeth herself is a fascinating character, both wise beyond her years, and almost childlike in her excitement about her impending nuptials. (When she and her fiancé talk about not seeing each other for a year, you get the sense she hasn’t had much time for personal affairs.) By the end, though, La Boda’s amorphousness diffuses the emotions it might have stirred, and Weyer’s combination of arrogance and lassitude leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Murder One (June 22, 9-11 p.m.; June 23 1-3 a.m., A&E-TV 30) It’s scheduled for release on DVD in April 2001, but if you’re impatient or just cheap, A&E’s offering an excellent second chance to catch Steven Bochco’s groundbreaking (and, of course, short-lived) series. Set in a high-priced L.A. attorney’s office, the idea was to follow a single case for the course of 22 episodes; the result was a fascinating, in-detail look inside the legal process that makes similarly themed shows (e.g. Law & Order) look laughably simplified. The first two episodes air back to back; the show continues weekly. It’s worth it for Daniel Benzali’s head-tilts alone.