Also this issue:

Let's Waltz Again
The Last Waltz hits theaters one more time.
-Sam Adams

Hair Apparent
Human Nature’s scruffy scribe and downy director talk about making their comedy of hair-ors.
-Sam Adams

Workingman's Dead
An unemployed man deceives his family in the haunting Time Out.
-Sam Adams

new

continuing

April 18-24, 2002

screen picks

Screen Picks

Festival Favorites (Thu., April 18, Ritz East, Second and Sansom sts., 215-733-0608, www.phillyfests.com) The Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema -- or, as it's now to be called, the Philadelphia Film Festival -- closes out with a day of screenings plucked from the audience's faves. They include Blue Vinyl (noon); Now or Never, Time Is Money (12:30 p.m.); Strange Fruit (2:15 p.m.); Christmas in the Clouds (2:45 p.m.); Daughter From Danang (5 p.m.); Inheritance (5:15 p.m.); Emmett's Mark (7:15 p.m.; sold out); Snipes (7:30 p.m.); Bikini Bandits (9:30 p.m.; sold out); and Trouble Every Day (9:45 p.m.). We'll wrap up the festival next week, but until then, catch one more flick before getting back to normal life.

John Pierson (Thu., April 18, 5:30 p.m., $8, Ritter Hall, Temple University, 13th St. and Montgomery Ave., 215-204-3859) Considering that he's never actually made a movie, it's no small feat that John Pierson's name is as synonymous with independent film as John Sayles' or Kevin Smith's. Of course, given that both Smith and Sayles have graduated to multimillion-dollar projects and no one's stepped up to take their place, you have to wonder exactly what "independent" means these days. If anyone has the answer to that question -- or at least some interesting thoughts on the subject -- it'll be Pierson, whose career is most easily summed up in the title of his memoir Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes. (The "Spike" and "Mike" are, respectively, Lee and Moore, whose careers owe a major debt to Pierson's intervention.)

Margaret Mead Traveling Film & Video Festival (Fri.-Sun., April 19-21, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 33rd and Spruce sts., 215-898-4000, www.upenn.edu/museum/MeadFilmFest) If your film-fest stamina's not tapped out, head on over to the Mead fest, three days of anthropologically focused (but usually not academic) documentaries that span from Indonesia to Chiapas. The Making of the Revolution (Sat., 2 p.m.), which chronicles the last two weeks of Slobodan Milosevic's regime, sounds particularly intriguing, as does A Poet (Sun., 2 p.m.), a dramatic/documentary hybrid that recalls the massive anti-communist purges that took place in Indonesia in 1965.

Paths to Paradise (Fri., April 9, 8 p.m., $6, Moore College of Art + Design, 20th and Race sts., 215-568-4515, ext. 4099) To aficionados of the genre, Raymond Griffith is the great lost silent comedian; noted critic Walter Kerr penned a paean to Griffith in his 1979 book The Silent Clowns. Even Kerr put Griffith "after Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd and Langdon," but that's still high praise. Few of Griffith's films survive, but Paths to Paradise is considered the best of them.

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June 12, 2003
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