Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Movies with Live Soundtracks (Fri.-Sun., March 11-13, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6575) Normally, the lineup of this weekend's Large Marge series would be cause for untrammeled celebration: Jan Svankmajer's eye-popping Alice, a trio of Kenneth Anger shorts and the original Invaders from Mars. (Okay, you can trammel the last just a bit.) The musicians seem a good lot, too: the Notekillers' David Frist, Autopoesis, Doctor and Philip and DJ Robotrake. There's just one problem with their plan to provide new soundtracks to the movies: They've already got soundtracks, and good ones.

The sparse, dissociative original soundtrack perfectly complements the surreal dislocations of Svankmajer's loose adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (Fri., 7 p.m.), a flat-out masterpiece whose combination of live action and stop-motion animation instills a nagging fear of inanimate objects. And Anger's use of pop music was as subversive and revolutionary as his blatantly queer imagery: Kustom Kar Kommandos (Sun., 5 p.m., with Anger's Puce Moment and Invaders from Mars) matches dreamy, sexualized images of '50s cars being buffed to a heavenly shine with the Parris Sisters' angelic "Dream Lover," while Invocation of My Demon Brother (which precedes Alice) famously combines footage of the Rolling Stones with performances by satanist Anton LaVey and Manson running-buddy Bobby Beausoleil.

Large Marge's Rich Wexler, who has commendably put in for 35mm prints of everything except The Muppet Movie, whose sing-along screenings (Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.) will benefit Spiral Q Puppet Theater, says that some of the musicians will incorporate the movie's original soundtrack into their performances, and it seems clear that the new scores are their way of paying tribute to movies they genuinely love (although the proof will be in the pudding). With any luck, the Large Marge event will spawn enough enthusiasm for an unadulterated screening, when even the musicians can sit back and watch.

Death and the Maiden/Alice in Wonderland (Sat., March 12, noon, Bryn Mawr Theater, 824 W. Lancaster Ave., 610-527-9898) The Bryn Mawr Theater officially reopens with these simultaneous screenings, preceded by a ribbon-cutting and introduction by Ben Kingsley, who will also be regaling the crowd at the Weekend Film Festival. (See www.weekendfilmfest.com.) In one, Kingsley plays a South American man held captive by a woman convinced he was the government official who tortured her; in the other, he's the Caterpillar in the most recent BBC adaptation of Lewis Carroll's books. Decide for yourselves which is creepier.

In addition to sharing programming with the County and Ambler theaters, the Bryn Mawr Theater is part of a larger film institute that promises "a comprehensive film studies curriculum," including lectures, seminars, workshops and children's programming. Stay tuned for, we hope, much more.

Channels of Rage (Wed., March 16, 7 p.m., free, International House) Originally scheduled to open with Turtles Can Fly, which the Ritz poached for a theatrical run (see it anyway), I-House's Middle East Week kicks off with this worthy replacement, a documentary about the conflicted relationship between two Israeli rappers, one Jewish and one Arab. Although hip-hop initially provided a place for nonviolent conflict, the toxic combination of gangsterism and media hype has spawned the pernicious idea (so profitably exploited by 50 Cent) that shooting or getting shot is the ultimate validation. In Israel, unfortunately, getting hit by a bullet is no distinction. The ammunition in the escalating, and initially friendly, battle between Zionist Subliminal (Kobi Shimoni) and Palestinean TN (Tamer Nafar) is nationalism.

Anat Halachmi's film begins in 2000, during a period of relative calm. Subliminal's "Living from Day to Day" details a precarious existence, but when he drops a verse about "blowing up places like explosive plastic," the reference seems almost playful. Up-and-coming TN shares Sublminal's stage and raps in Hebrew; as the two horse around in their shared tour bus, one shouts, "Film the coexistence!"

This being Israel, it doesn't last. The intifada heats up, and the rappers' rhetoric grows more intense. Already nationalistic, Subliminal wraps himself in the Israeli flag, warning Jews about the danger of dissent in "Divide and Conquer," whose hook proclaims in Arabic, "This is our land." Still, he threatens to eject audience members who yell out racist slogans, trying to draw a line between pro-Israeli and anti-Arab sentiment. "Not "Death to the Arabs,'" he tells the crowd. "Life to the Jews." TN's raps don't seem as inflammatory, perhaps because a line like "Rat-a-tat/ What's that?/ An Arab's been shot" sounds like something off Straight Outta Compton, but in interviews, he repeatedly likens the Israeli government to the Nazis.

In private, both men question their public certainties. TN becomes so conflicted he can't decide whether to rap in Hebrew, Arabic or English, while "health problems" leave Subliminal looking drawn and sickly. In a back-alley confrontation, the two blame the "mad-ia" for exacerbating their differences, although the region's worsening instability is an equally likely culprit. Channels of Rage validates hip-hop as a global medium for expressing cultural anguish, but it also worries over the issue of whether art can heal such anguish or only vent it.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn ($26.98 DVD) "Nobody goes to the movies anymore," sighs one old man to another in Tsai Ming-Liang's elegy for the moviegoing experience (which, appropriately enough, never played a Philadelphia theater). Set in a cavernous Taipei movie palace, Goodbye is literally illuminated by King Hu's martial arts classic Dragon Inn, which plays through most of Tsai's 83-minute movie. Hu's movie is more often heard than seen, though, since Tsai focuses his attention on the audience, who themselves have things other than watching movies on their mind. The clubfooted ticket-taker drags herself up several flights of stairs to leave a sticky bun for the unseen projectionist; gay men cruise each other in the bathroom, disappearing into the theater's endless corridors; a woman crunches watermelon seeds whose husks carpet the steps.

True to form, Goodbye, Dragon Inn is full of the rapturously composed master shots common to (though never common in) Tsai's movies. But there's something about the film's elegant silences that screams to be filled with the joy movies like Dragon Inn provide — a feeling that even Tsai's most ardent defenders would have to admit is outside his area of expertise. Five minutes of the upcoming Kung Fu Hustle is all it takes to convince you that the movies are as alive as ever, even if they've had to adapt to survive. There's something suspicious about the fact that so many self-proclaimed cinephiles embraced Goodbye while shunning The Dreamers, as if they'd rather have a movie that ratifies their own sense of privileged isolation than one that says the cinema's highest purpose is to engage the outside world.

Wellspring's DVD also includes Tsai's sadly beautiful short film The Skywalk Is Gone, a quasi-sequel to What Time Is It There? which sets the stage for the reported shocker of his newest movie, The Wayward Cloud.

Misc. Picks Andrew's Video Vault goes sci-fi with Edgar Ulmer's The Man from Planet X and the Molly Ringwald-starring Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (Thu., 8 p.m., 4014 Walnut St., Terrace Room). "Issues in Black Independent Cinema" continues with Scribe Video Center's screening of Noland Walker's documentary Citizen King (Mon., 7 p.m., 249 S. 36th St.). Editor Mary Sweeney discusses her craft before a 35 mm screening of The Straight Story (lecture Tue., 5 p.m., 210 S. 34th St, Room B1; screening 7 p.m., The Bridge).