November 27-December 3, 2003

screen picks

No Logo (Thu., Nov. 27, 9 p.m.; Fri., Nov. 28, 1 a.m., DUTV) Naomi Klein's No Logo is the bible of the antiglobalization movement, but sometimes you get the feeling that anticorporate activists need to go to Sunday school a little more regularly. Aired on DUTV last week (and due for a repeat broadcast in December), The Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping showed street activist Bill Talen taking on Starbucks, Disney and NYU in a bid to slow corporate encroachment in Manhattan. (If you don't think of universities as corporations, you haven't been out to West Philly recently.) But all I could think, beside the fact that Talen doesn't make a very convincing preacher, is what an implausible request Talen's "Stop shopping, people!" really is. barring a return to the barter system, the idea of checking out from consumer culture is no better than a bourgeois pipe dream.

The situation, as Klein points out in the Media Education Foundation's excellent 40-minute redaction of her book -- mostly an interview with superimposed video footage -- is far more complicated and insidious, so much so that it's virtually impossible to talk about. As Klein says when discussing "the commons," her term for the public space that is increasingly given over to private advertising, "it's like trying to talk about the Matrix while you're inside the Matrix." In addition to encapsulating the nature of lifestyle advertising, in which corporations sell buyers a potential image of themselves rather than a specific product (thus the spread of a given logo over thousands of disparate products), No Logo argues that corporations like Nike effectively no longer produce anything except their own brand image. Products are manufactured in faraway countries divorced from their consumers' awareness, while the swoosh retains its stateside allure. Maybe a million billion retail dollars can't be wrong: Americans would rather buy their coffee at a cookie-cutter Starbucks, and let Wal-Mart strip-mine our small towns. God knows, they don't have time to read. But if you can spare three-quarters of an hour while fighting off that turkey coma, you'll find yourself a lot more enlightened than preached at.

Porn Open Call (Fri., Nov. 28, 9 p.m., $8, The Parlor, 1170 S. Broad St. , www.big-top.org) Apparently the first one drew so many horny Fringe-ites that they're staging a repeat, a "porn-kegger benefit" for the Bumpin' Big Top. No Paris Hilton jokes, please.

PIFVA Presents (Wed., Dec. 3, 7 p.m., free, Free Library of Philadelphia, 19th and Vine sts., 215-686-5322) The first of two consecutive PIFVA Wednesday nights at the Free Library, both highlighting local works. On the menu this evening: Ron Kanter's Piano Suite, Wendy Weinberg's The Art of Activism, Ken Winikur's John Lumia: Unauthorized and Sloan Seale's Recovery Portrait.

The Ox-Bow Incident/The Hired Hand ($19.98/$19.98 or $39.98 DVD) Ron Howard's atrocious The Missing shows how low Westerns have sunk. Everyone knows that oaters are out of fashion, and most chalk it up to the modern audience's "sophistication," their unwillingness to swallow all that cowboys-and-Indians stuff. But watch these two movies, from 1942 and 1971 respectively, and you'll see that moral complexity is just what's missing from The Missing. It's like a remake of The Searchers with the racism amped up and the culpability stripped away.

Its wartime context informs Ox-Bow's ardent condemnation of mob violence. Like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Ox-Bow takes place in the period when law had arrived in the west, but not the manpower to enforce it -- which is to say that enforcing justice was not the province of a specialized class, but of any man with a horse and a gun. Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan are two such men, passing through a small cattle town, when the news comes that a local man has been murdered by rustlers. Though the outsiders are no pillars of moral rectitude -- Fonda's short-tempered boozer picks a bar fight out of sheer boredom -- they can sense an evil mood brewing. The sheriff is nowhere to be found, and his deputy quickly assembles a posse that looks more like a lynch mob. The men argue over principles, and those principles are put into action when three strangers are discovered roaming the countryside. Conducted under the looming branches of a tree that may soon bear the weight of three men, the ensuing argument has the unadorned directness of a Brechtian teaching play (so much so that you might forgive the set's obvious inauthenticity). Though the viewer is never really implicated in the moral debate (you always know you're on Fonda's side), a shocking twist at the end reveals that even a conscientious viewer may have assumed more than he realized.

It was another of his father's Westerns -- 1946's My Darling Clementine -- that inspired Peter Fonda when the time came to follow up the phenomenon that was Easy Rider. There's no mob mentality in The Hired Hand; in fact, there's no mob. Shot by McCabe & Mrs. Miller's Vilmos Zsigmond (and gorgeously reproduced on Sundance's DVD), the film's New Mexico countryside is a Fauvist wilderness where the implications of freedom are as frightening as they are intoxicating. Fonda and the superb Warren Oates (ably saluted in the expansive making-of included with the two-disc "collector's edition") are inseparable comrades who have been roaming the range together for years, until the death of their young companion compels Fonda to seek out the wife he abandoned seven years earlier (the splendid, stoic Verna Bloom). The lap dissolve-ridden film's pastoral psychedelia is countered by Oates and Bloom's flinty earthiness, and Fonda's gangly androgyny makes him perfect for the role of a man who doesn't fit anywhere. (Even his dusty trail clothes hang off him.) Fonda's heavy-handed symbolism can be trying at times (check his commentary to see how much worse it would have been if he'd accomplished what he set out to), but the film's vision of a three-way love triangle between Fonda, Bloom and Oates is a canny unpeeling of Western archetypes. (Fonda's last words to his compadre: "Hold me, Arch.") Inevitably, genre movies reflect (or, really, refract) their times. The Hired Hand reconceives frontier exploration as an inner journey, just as The Missing reflects a nation trying to look concerned without engaging in any messy soul-searching.

Misc. Picks Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Fri.-Sat, Nov. 28-29, midnight, Bryn Mawr Theater); A Christmas Story (Sat., Nov. 29, 2 p.m., Colonial Theatre); The Music Man (Sat., Nov. 29, 3 p.m., Prince Music Theater).

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