October 30-November 5, 2003

screen picks

by Sam Adams

OT: Our Town (Thu., Oct. 30, 7 p.m., $50, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-567-9700) For the students of Compton's Dominguez High, violence is a part of everyday life: 'Homecoming, riots, prom, graduation -- it fits right in.'. It might seem an odd place to stage Thornton Wilder's drama of small-town New England life in the early 20th century, even more so when we find out that it's the first play to be staged at the school in more than 20 years. But 25-year-old teacher Catherine Borek has a dream, one that D-High's misfits find themselves sucked in by, at times despite themselves. Though the cash-strapped school finds the money to support the basketball team, there's not a cent, nor even a stage, for this production, but Scott Hamilton Kennedy's documentary gives you a front-row seat in the cafetorium.

Unfortunately, OT -- no doubt in an attempt to appeal to younger viewers -- is edited in an attention-grabbing, reality-TV style that often does an injustice to its inarguably fascinating subject. Personalities come through, but the way they've developed or changed doesn't. Kennedy is also Borek's boyfriend, and the movie is edited from her point of view, in the sense that successfully staging the play is the ultimate victory; we don't get much of a sense of what that might mean to the kids. We know what it doesn't mean, how little they relate to the subject matter. They outwardly laugh at Wilder's cornpone cadences; even attempting to praise the play, the best one actor can come up with is 'Romeo and Juliet mixed with The Cosby Show.' The key moment, a welcome release for the hitherto unexpressed tension, comes when Borek plays U2's 'MLK' for her students, hoping to convince them to use it in a climactic scene, and they can no longer suppress their giggles. 'It sounds like one of those Lion King songs,' says one sharp-eared teen.

When the final production rolls around, and it turns out the cast has taken the 'our' in Wilder's title literally, adding its own twists to Wilder's production, it comes as a shock; the process of personalizing the play, which must have been fascinating, is totally omitted. Perhaps it wasn't easily summarized enough, or Kennedy just didn't have the footage, but it's a gaping hole. Still, it's a privilege to get to know these kids, who turn out to be as smart and self-aware as high-school outcasts everywhere. As Ebony, who plays the central role of the Stage Manager, perfectly sums up, 'We're not that different -- but we're very different from what you think we are.'

This one-time screening serves a dual purpose, as a benefit for Germantown High's Community Scholars program, and as a Philadelphia introduction to Film Movement, the DVD film series founded by The Shooting Gallery's Larry Meistrich. Despite its unfortunate name (everyone I've informally polled makes the same association), Film Movement is an interesting experiment, a monthly series offered to subscribers both on DVD and theatrically (although OT is the first movie to open in Philadelphia). Meistrich will attend the screening to answer questions and drum up support. (If you're feeling miserly, the DVD is also available at www.filmmovement.com.)

Spooky Stuff As always, Halloween weekend offers a panoply of chills, thrills and bellyaches. Instead of gorging on candy corn, consider treating yourself to a Secret Cinema feast. The mischief-night event at the Franklin Inn Club includes dinner (last seating at 7 p.m.) and a double feature of The Strange Case of Doctor Rx and the Bela Lugosi-starring Bowery at Midnight, not to mention the 3-D short Third Dimensional Murder (glasses provided). RSVP for dinner to jschwart@voicenet.com or 215-568-4515, ext. 4099. $20 gets you the whole shebang; $7 will get you into the films at 8, assuming seats remain.

The scares continue at the Prince, as the Release the Bats festival winds down. Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) will grace the big screen Friday night at 7:30, preceded by a Halloween parade, led by Spiral Q Puppet Theater, which leaves from the Rosenbach Museum at 5:30. Show up before Guillermo del Toro's Cronos (see below) and build a Day of the Dead altar. Construction begins Saturday at 6:30; the movie (screening for free, on DVD) is at 8.

The County and Ambler theaters will be hosting several showings of The Ghosts of Edendale, the new film from The Last Broadcast co-director Stefan Avalos (see Repertory Film, p. 55 for showtimes), and although horrormeisters Exhumed Films are taking a well-earned holiday this Halloween, don't miss their screening of a new print of Herschell Gordon Lewis' splatter classic, Blood Feast, next Friday.

Cronos ($19.99 DVD) It makes sense that, as explained on Lions Gate's overstuffed new DVD, Guillermo del Toro wrote the script for Cronos when he was 21, and wasn't able to film it until he was 28. Though the film, an innovative take on vampire mythology where the culprit is a medieval contraption housing a bloodsucking insect, boasts the rich imagery that's become characteristic of del Toro's films (which include Mimic and The Devil's Backbone), it's an unmitigated clunker on a basic story level. Del Toro and crew manufacture some impressive sets on an obviously minimal budget, like an enormous room shrouded in hospital drapes and festooned with plastic-swaddled cherubim, but the lurches between scenes are so abrupt it's difficult to just enjoy the view. A few moments break through the murk, like the recently vamped Federico Luppi gnawing at his own arm to keep the hunger at bay, but it's hard to see it as more than a pencil sketch for del Toro's later work.

Robert Capa: In Love and War/John Garfield (Sat., Nov. 1, 8 p.m.; Sun., Nov. 2, 2 p.m.; Mon., Nov. 3, 7 p.m., $8-$13.50, Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St., 215-446-3033) The Jewish Film Festival's 2003-04 season kicks off with this straightforward but highly informative American Masters documentary on the life of famed war photographer Robert Capa. Colleagues like Henri Cartier-Bresson weigh in on Capa's importance, while no less than Isabella Rossellini recounts the affair between Capa and her mother, Ingrid Bergman (asserted to be the inspiration for the James Stewart/Grace Kelly relationship in Rear Window). John Garfield, a brief film essay by From the Journals of Jean Seberg director Mark Rappaport, takes a more impressionistic approach, using clips from Garfield's movies and Rappaport's dry narration to condense the blacklist-battered actor's history into nine minutes. Capa biographer Richard Whelan will speak at the Saturday and Sunday screenings.

Knife in the Water/The Tenant ($39.95/$9.99 DVD) What a difference an Oscar makes. Regardless of its merits as a film (a little too self-absorbed for my taste), Roman Polanski's Pianist win has clearly pushed open the DVD floodgates: Four of his lesser-known movies have hit the shelves since July. The lurid, knowing Bitter Moon and the taut Death and the Maiden have their merits, but these two are the real finds. The 1962 Knife, Polanski's first feature, was until The Pianist the last feature he'd shot in Poland, and shows him clearly chafing at the Communist Party's bit. The oft-imitated plot (most literally copied by Dead Calm) has a bourgeois couple picking up a young hitchhiker and inviting him aboard their yacht, where sexual and cultural tensions come to a boil. Polanski almost seems to be critiquing the genre in advance, though: Rather than using it to reaffirm the family unit, Polanski makes his youth the hero (albeit a fairly unlikable one), the harbinger of a new age. That the film literally ends at a crossroads is perfectly appropriate, since it's riddled with ambivalence. Criterion's disc beautifully renders the original black and white (albeit with the search function disabled, at Polanski's request), and includes a priceless bonus: a full disc of Polanski's short films, which show in full flower the surrealism that only creeps into his full-length movies.

Paramount's Tenant disc is a cheapie by comparison, but its bargain-bin price conceals one of Polanski's most viscerally troubling movies. The plot, about a lodger who becomes convinced that the other residents of his apartment building are out to do him harm, has obvious similarities to Rosemary's Baby, but the familiar form is merely a vehicle for Polanski's neuroses, never unveiled so nakedly as here. The first movie Polanski directed after fleeing sexual assault charges in California, The Tenant is consumed with repulsion for its title character, not at all coincidentally played by Polanski himself (his only self-directed lead). As the weasel-faced Trelkovsky, renting a room in small-minded Paris, Polanski begins as a sympathetic victim, but as the plots against him grow ever more baroque, we begin to suspect that the persecution may in fact be in his own mind. When he responds to a slur against his nationality with a desperate, 'But I'm a French citizen now!' no translation is needed. And luckily so, since the dialogue track is a poorly dubbed mishmash, with American actors (Shelley Winters, Melvyn Douglas) speaking English, Isabelle Adjani poorly re-voiced and the rest of the French cast recorded in their native tongue. (Switch to the French audio track for verification.) In a sense, though, the disembodied voices might only add to the profound sense of dislocation, which rises at times to terrifying heights. With Trelkovsky's delusion growing ever greater (no fair spoiling the end), The Tenant goes off the rails in its last third. But damned if it doesn't almost take you with it.

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