NEW YORK: The Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual Film Comment Selects series (February 20 - March 5) offers the chance to catch up with a wide variety of movies, old and new, that have been judged as neglected by the country's leading serious movie magazine. This year, the recent stuff includes Michael Almereyda's latest dispatch from New Orleans, Paradise, Jean-Claude Brisseau's controversial A l’aventure, Paul Schrader's Holocaust-survivor story Adam Resurrected with Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe, the South Korean thriller The Chaser (Chugyeogja), John Boorman's The Tiger's Tail, a doppelganger story starring Brendan Gleeson, and Lake Tahoe, Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke's follow-up to his small-scale charmer Duck Season. The older selections include some real buried gems, including two documentaries by Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines: the notorious Demon Lover Diary, which is about the making of a zero-budget mid-1970s horror movie that ends with the documentary makers fleeing the scene in apparent fear for their lives from their subjects, one of whom mangled his hand so that he could use the insurance money to finance his movie and somehow arranged with Ted Nugent to use ol' Wango Tango's house for a location; and Seventeen, a look at teen culture in Muncie, Indiana that was made in 1983 for public television but deemed too raw for broadcast. There are also rare screenings of films by Situationist International founder Guy Debord and Robert Aldrich's seldom seen The Killing of Sister George.
Each weekend between now and the first week of April, starting tonight, the IFC Center will be having midnight screenings of a different film by David Cronenberg, including his first really big mainstream hit, 1986's The Fly (on March 6 and 7), but also with some out-of-the-way stuff. On February 27 and 28, IFC shows Spider, an adaptation of a Patrick McGrath novel starring Ralph Fiennes and a magnificent, jaw-dropping Miranda Richardson, that may be his best film of the decade and is almost certainly his most underappreciated.
Back in the days of studio musicals, Marni Nixon was the best-known off-screen singing voice in musicals. Nixon provided the high notes of Marilyn Monroe's version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and dubbed the singing voices of Margaret O'Brien in The Secret Garden, Deborah Kerr in The King and I and An Affair to Remember, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. It was after that last film was released that Nixon, who received no on-screen credit for this work, became a celebrity and inspired a minor scandal when word leaked out of her contributions to the performances of non-singing stars in singing roles. She subsequently appeared on-screen as a singing nun in The Sound of Music; more recently, she supplied a voice for the Disney animated feature Mulan. On Monday, February 23, Nixon, who at 78 is still performing on-stage, will appear live at the Film Forum to promote her new autobiography, I Could Have Sung All Night. She'll be interviewed on-stage by the Film Forum's Bruce Goldstein and her co-writer, Stephen Cole.
DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA: The tenth annual Nevermore Film Festival, a three-day celebration of "horror, gothic, & fantasy", starts today and runs through the weekend. A treat for genre fans, it's a chance to kick back and sample what the up-and-coming mad scientists have been brewing in theire labs, where horror junkies with low budgets and fevered brains try to bring something new and personal to the field even as the big studios are content to run off the thousandth xerox copy of a franchise that had worn out its welcome before the returns on its original installment were cold. (Yes, we're looking at you, Jason Voorhees.) This year's highlights include the trapped-in-a-supermarket thriller Alien Raiders and the moody, urban British ghost story The Disappeared. There are also old school screenings of such family friendly classics as James Whale's Frankenstein and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
BERKELEY: The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival runs at the Pacific Film Archives from February 25 -27. The festival aims to be "the leading showcase for committed and courageous films that open our eyes to a range of human rights issues around the globe", and this year's program includes some sharp and poetic treatments of those issues, among them Up the Yangtze, The Sari Soldiers, about women who participated in the Nepalese civil war; the Argentinean lament Our Disappeared; and the paranoia-inducing Secrecy.
