Wesley Willis, Chicago’s answer to Daniel Johnston, was a schizophrenic rock ‘n’ roll troubadour and outsider artist. His songs are simple, often just a drum machine or keyboard, all under Willis’ endearingly tone deaf voice. Incredibly prolific, Willis recorded over 50 albums. Filmed over the last four years of his life, the documentary Wesley Willis’ Joy Rides premiered at the 2008 Slamdance Film Festival (where Philly-set The New Year Parade took home top honors) and went on to the win the Gold Hugo for Chicago Award at the Chicago International Film Fest. The title refers to how Willis famously saw rock ‘n’ roll — as joy ride music.
In anticipation of Joy Rides‘ December 8 DVD release, National Mechanics will host a a free midnight screening of the doc on Monday, November 30. Trailer is above. What’s your fave Wesley Willis song? Nothing beats my frist experience with Willis, which was “Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonalds.” Enjoy.
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Wesley Willis Joyrides, Mon., Nov. 30, midnight, free, National Mechanics, 22 S. Third St., 215-701-4883.
Just in case you don’t subscribe to our comments RSS feed (WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE!?), we just wanted to let you know that the good people at First Person Arts posted that there will be a free screening of Still Bill, the doc about legendary, reclusive soul singer Bill Withers, tonight at Drexel at 7 p.m. Afterward, there will be a Q&A with filmmakers Damani Baker and Alex Vlack.
Our own Josh Middleton caught Still Bill this weekend and gushed about it: “It made me giggle, it made me sob and it inspired me to want to be better at what I do.” Here’s the trailer just in case you forgot:
Bill Withers is probably one of the least polarizing artists of all time. Do you know anyone who reaches for the radio dial when “Lovely Day” or “Ain’t No Sunshine” comes on the radio? Of course you don’t, it’s musical blasphemy. That voice! Those arrangements! But when Withers was at the top of his game, he simply walked away from it all for a quieter, outta-the-spotlight life. On Sunday, November 8 the First Person Festival screens the documentary Still Bill (check out the trailer above) tracks down the reclusive Withers and he opens about why he shunned the limelight and what he plans to do from now. Withers obvs won’t be there (reclusive isn’t a word you throw around lightly), so Johnny Ingram will be there, singing the hits, instead.
While you’re at it, watch Withers receive an achievement award from the R&B Foundation last year at the Kimmel Center, with Dionne Warwick (”Use Me” is my fave Withers song too, Dionne!) introducing a Withers and a medley of his tunes:
The Philadelphia Film Society announced via their Twitter that the will host a free screening of P-Star Rising, about nine-year-old rapper Priscilla Diaz, on Tuesday, November 10 at 7 p.m. at the Piazza. For four years, director Gabriel Noble followed Diaz and her dad Jesse. a supposed-to-be-hot-shit rapper in the ’80s who never made it big. Now a struggling single father, Jesse sees Priscilla, or P-Star, as his family’s last shot at musical greatness.
P-Star Rising has been on the fest circuit for awhile and it played the recent Philadelphia Film Festival but I didn’t catch it. Any Crit Massers see it? Any good?
P-Star herself will be there to perform after the screening. Not sure of P-Stars skills? Listen to her rhyme on a rooftop with Noble, courtesy of IFC.com.
P-Star Rising screening, Tue., Nov. 10, 7 p.m., Piazza at Schmidts, Third & Hancock streets, atthepiazza.com.
Sara Zia Ebrahimi, the founder and curator the of the Flickering Light Film series, announced that her project would have to end its season early due to a rent increase at its Sedgwick Theater home.
Flickering Light’s mission is to screen the unseen, from shorts — which rarely have a platform outside of film festival in the U.S. — to works by often neglected filmmaking communities — like women, LGBTQ-ers and people of color. But for Ebrahimi, Flickering Light also symbolizes a neighborhood unifier, a place where the people of Germantown, East and West Mt. Airy can gather and see films they can’t find anywhere else. “That’s where I live, own a house and that’s my community,” she says. “No matter what the screening series will continue, and it will continue in Northwest Philadelphia.”
As Ebrahimi points out, Flickering Light isn’t dead, simply taking another look at their format. The series, which began early this year as a monthly screening and to weekly events for the second season, drew 25-100 people. Looking to the future, Ebrahimi says she’s eyeing several possibilities, including renting a permanent storefront, joining with other business partners or even staying at the Sedgwick, depending on whether they come down on their rent increase. Flickering Light has two more programs on the docket — “Limits of Reason”: An International Collection of Short Films About Alternate Worlds and States of Mind on Saturday, November 14 and “I’m So Into You”: The Best of the Small Changes Screening Series on Saturday, November 21 — before closing up shop until next spring. As always, admission is $5.
Ebrahimi says she was thinking about the recent TLA closure and how it effects how we are able to see movies that don’t have blockbuster marquees, to say the least. “You can’t get them on DVD, you can’t watch them on the internet,” she says of the films Flickering Light shows. “There needs to be a place to screen this work.
Remember this summer’s Midnight Madness? The witching hour movie series returns to the Ritz at the Bourse this Saturday with Beetlejuice. Here’s the schedule:
Saturday, October 24 BEETLEJUICE
(USA 1988) PG, 92 min
Sight gags and puns abound as the diabolically funny title character (played with gruesome wit by Michael Keaton) helps “newlydeads” Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis rid their home of obnoxious new owners Catherine O’Hara, Jeffrey Jones and Winona Ryder. From Tim Burton, director of Big Fish, Ed Wood, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Edward Scissorhands.
Friday, October 30 & Saturday, October 31 DEAD ALIVE
(New Zealand1992) NR, 97 min
If you thought the ’50s were all bobby-sox and innocence, you didn’t live next door to Lionel. After his domineering mother is bitten by a vicious Sumatran Rat-Monkey, a deliriously funny gorefest ensues, featuring zombies, severed limbs, internal organs, buckets of blood and one mean lawnmower! From Peter Jackson, director of the King Kong remake, The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Frighteners.
Saturday, November 7 THE BREAKFAST CLUB
(USA 1985) R, 97 min
A wrestler, a rebel, a brain, a beauty and a shy girl share Saturday detention in a Chicago high school.
Saturday, November 14 WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT
(USA 1988) PG, 104 min
In a world where cartoons coexist with humans, a private eye tries to clear a long-eared fugitive of murder charges.
Saturday, November 21
ROSEMARY’S BABY
(USA 1968) 6, 136 min
Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s chilling novel stars Mia Farrow as an innocent young bride who moves into a New York brownstone with her husband (John Cassavetes), only to be terrorized by a coven of witches. Will the elderly couple next door (Sidney Blackmer and Oscar-winner Ruth Gordon) be her salvation or damnation? Find out in one of the most frightening films ever made!
Saturday, November 28 PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE
(USA 1985) PG, 90 min
When his beloved bike is stolen, Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) sets out on a hilarious cross-country trek that leads him to the basement of the Alamo and the backlot at Warner Bros. Studios. Highlights include Large Marge (the truck-driving ghost) and Pee-wee’s Big Shoe Dance (”Tequila!”). Co-written by Phil Hartman, Michael Varhol and Reubens. Original music score by Danny Elfman. Directed by Tim Burton (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Big Fish, Ed Wood).
Saturday, December 5 TAXI DRIVER
(USA 1976) R, 113 min
Robert De Niro is absolutely chilling in Martin Scorsese’s classic film about a disturbed New York cabbie who befriends a teenage hooker (Jodie Foster) and tries to free her from her pimp (Harvey Keitel). He also begins stalking political worker Cybill Shepherd, just as work in the nighttime jungle gets the best of him. An atmospheric, violent urban nightmare, from the acclaimed director of The Departed, Gangs of New York and Raging Bull.
Saturday, December 12 THE NEVERENDING STORY
(Germany 1984) PG, 92 min
A New York schoolboy escapes into a book about a boy warrior and an empress.
I will so be at Pee Wee’s Big Adventure on Nov. 28, which is still my favorite Tim Burton movie (”You don’t wanna get mixed up with a guy like me. I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel. So long, Dott.”) although Beetlejuice is a classic for several reasons. Namely this one:
Don’t worry if you forget this schedule. We’ll always have it up at citypaper.net/repfilm.
Ritz at the Bourse, midnight, $9, 400 Ranstead St., 215-925-7500, LandmarkTheatres.com
In this week’s Agenda section, I wrote about Brian DePalma’s Blow Out, which screens this Sunday at the Art Museum and stars a young and studly John Travolta:
Hometown boy Brian DePalma’s Blow Out is more an homage to movie-making itself than the thriller it bills itself to be. Jack Terry (John Travolta) is a Philly-based sound technician who inadvertently witnesses the possible assassination of a governor while searching for sound for his current B-movie project. Sure, the film geekery is great, especially while dissecting the confluence of sound and image. But the best part is seeing early ’80s Philadelphia in all its gritty glory.
Watch the trailer below:
It’s oft considered the best of the Philly-set movies, and while I love it and few scenes top the Bicentennial parade sequence (you can catch a few shots in the trailer), I don’t think it would top my list. Sure it would have an entry, but wouldn’t have the number one spot. So what else would be on there? Click For More »
Cybela Clare walks around in public with a big red parrot on her shoulder talking about alien abductions and government conspiracies. “I think this is the most fun, amazing, amusing, exciting subject on this planet,” Cybela says. It’s also the subject of her upcoming quasi-fiction documentary, Bird’s Eye View (read Molly Eichel’s review), about Cleo (played by Cybela, who also wrote and directed the feature length film), who goes on an investigatory mission after her favorite parrot mysteriously disappears. Eighteen years of research culminates in the film’s world premiere this Friday at the Roxy.
Cybela on how to protect yourself from aliens:
I think basically, if they really want to abduct somebody, it’s very, very hard to avoid it.
Cybela on why extraterrestrials are invading our planet:
If you were going to go to the best resort in the universe, it would probably be planet Earth.
Cybela on not being crazy:
I’ve interviewed people in Brazil, all over Brazil, and there are judges and lawyers and doctors in Brazil who claim they’ve been aboard spacecraft and they’ve been put in some kind of nitrogen liquid and they’ve been on other planets and, and — you think I’m crazy, right? I mean, I’m not, I’m just telling you the truth.
Cybela on where to learn more:
There’s just so much information out there that anybody who really wants to know should just go on the Internet and write in “UFO” or “extraterrestrial cover-up” or anything and they’re going to get thousands and thousands of Web sites of people who know a lot more than I do.
Cybela on angel figurines made by Yanni Posnakoff, who plays the spiritual guru living in a cave and communicating with alien life forms:
A lot of them have gold on them, and like, you know, real gold paint, you know, like gold, that looks like gold and the wings are gold and they glisten — they’re real gold.
Cybela on government intelligence:
There are a lot of presidents who tried to get this information for themselves, even Clinton couldn’t find out … Jackie Gleason, um, Nixon — he was a good friend of Nixon’s and Nixon knew about these aliens and these underground bases and he took him to Florida — I think it was called Holmes Airforce Base in Florida, and he showed Jackie Gleason in a special base there, a dead alien behind glass, you know, inside of a place, and Jackie Gleason … he made a house in upstate New York that looks like a flying saucer.
Cybela on aliens in Philadelphia:
But to be honest with you, I don’t know anybody in Philadelphia, anything that’s happened in Philadelphia having to do with UFOs or abductions. I think it’s a very unknown subject here … I hardly knew Philadelphia until now. And now that I’m back promoting my movie and that I have a place here now, I am totally in love with Philadelphia and I’m just thinking, how could people in New York not know how amazingly beautiful Philadelphia is and how much cleaner the city is than New York and how much sweeter the people seem to be, how much more mellow the people seem to be, how much more beautiful the people seem to be? People are so beautiful and attractive here and they’re so friendly and they all seem to love my bird, which I really like, and they’re so kind about my bird. I mean in New York, you can walk down the street with a bird on your shoulder, nobody will even look at the bird, won’t even notice you have a bird, they’ll scowl at you like you’re crazy. [Giggles] I’m serious.
Cybela on alien life expectancy:
It was supposedly 300 years old, this alien, because they live a lot longer than we do.
Cybella proving that biblical angels were really aliens:
There are all these paintings in the Vatican that have UFOs in the paintings.
Cybela on the Q&A format of this interview:
In other words, what do you mean, like, you give a question and I just give an answer, right?
Creative director Nick Zegel and cinematographer Kyle Pahlow
While the Jerz isn’t known for its killer waves, Philadelphians Nick Zegel and Kyle Pahlow set out to document a group of surfers from New Jersey and Pennsylvania in A Pleasant Surprise. While the hour-long film world premiered in the house that Springsteen built (aka, Asbury Park, N.J.), A Pleasant Surprise get its Philadelphia first showing tomorrow at the Piazza.
Zegel sent out the summary:
A Pleasant Surprise offers an honest look at the talents of a select group of surfers who live in a truly special part of the United States. Almost three years in the making, this film documents a world of contrast as daily changes in weather and waves prove to be all part of a larger picture; thumping beach breaks, cold water, and quick tropical storms are just a fraction of what you will find. Brought to you in Super 16mm, A Pleasant Surprise allows for the full beauty of this region and its surfers to be realized.
I haven’t caught it yet but I have a thing for surf movies, like Endless Summer and Riding Giants (not to mention the greatest surf movie of all time: Point Break). From the looks of the trailer, which you can watch below, it has the same Endless Summer vibe and I’m digging the 16 mm, which gives everything that grainy, film stock-y glow (Digital be damned! Long live Super 16!)
A Pleasant Surprise, 8 p.m., free, Piazza at Schmidts, Hancock St. and Germantown Ave., atthepiazza.com.
Staff Blog
“Alright, let’s rock it to Russia”: Wesley Willis doc screens at National Mechanics
