I LOVE A MAN IN UNIFORM
aka A MAN IN UNIFORM
Dir. David Wellington, 1993
Canada. 97 min.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTMBER 14 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 – 10 PM

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Some ideas deserve more than one film, and more than one author, they should knock around the collective canon of cinema for awhile in work that is not so much derivative as conversational. I LOVE A MAN IN UNIFORM makes no secret of its debt to TAXI DRIVER and indeed uses the shadow of the latter work as just another border marking the alienation of its main character. In this Canadian film from 1993, Tom McCamus plays Henry Addler, a bank clerk trying to make it as a full time actor. Henry has just landed a reoccurring role on a TV police drama. To get into the part he takes his police uniform home and begins to walk the streets of Toronto looking for real life at its worst – and the goodness that only authority can sustain. Eventually, he also acquires a gun.

CRAZED COP(aka One Way Out)
Dir. Paul Kyriazi, 1986
United States, 83 minutes

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 – 7:30 PM

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Ivan Rogers (Ballbuster, Karate Commando: Jungle Wolf 3) wrote and stars in this Indianaoplis-lensed crime flick as Detective Joe Weeks, a suicidal cops reeling from the murder of his wife while trying to take down the drug dealers who killed her. Crazed Cop (aka One Way Out) splits the balance between ultra-intense and moody psychological noir and off-the-wall insane 80’s exploitation flicks, balancing Rogers’ steely intensity but bizarre flourishes such as a gang of breakdancing assassins.

THE GUARD FROM UNDERGROUND (aka SECURITY GUARD FROM HELL)
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1992
Japan, 96 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

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Back from our Tidepoint Pictures Series last October!
Unfairly derided as a generic slasher flick ground out before Kiyoshi Kurosawa moved on to better-known and -received works, including CURE and PULSE, THE GUARD FROM UNDERGROUND features all Kurosawa’s signatures in nascent form – loneliness and isolation amid the everyday, dingy, banal locations made haunting, terror stemming from the gloom and nihility of human existence rather than shock or gore. Art historian Akiko begins her new job at a corporation the same day as an immense security guard, who happens to match the description of a murderous sumo wrestler released due to an insanity plea. The outsized antagonist is a true void – stating no one truly believes people like him can exist and repeatedly telling people not forget him, he’s a walking warning monsters are real and around us.
Kurosawa’s penchant for layering on social commentary is also present – Akiko’s corporation is so large it outsources and doesn’t control its own security, and her department, hastily thrown together to buy and sell art as commodity, technically doesn’t exist. All this housed in a sallow, sickly building constantly trapping its occupants even without the help of a vicious killer. Kurosawa once named Hitchcock and Ozu as his influences, and GUARD FROM UNDERGROUND’s direct blend of moody atmosphere and meat-and-potatoes suspense lands squarely between them.

Camp Motion Pictures presents: SATAN’S BLACK WEDDING
dir. Nick Philips, 1975,
61 mins, USA

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – MIDNIGHT

Mark travels to California to unravel the mystery surrounding his sister’s death. He learns that she had been writing a novel about Satanic worship and spent a good deal of time at an abandoned church outside of town. When Mark begins seeing her in the company of a creepy looking priest, he goes to the old church and learns that Satan himself has chosen him and his sister to be wed in unholy matrimony…and become the proud vampire parents of the Antichrist!

HEADLESS EYES
Kent Bateman, 1971
78 min, USA

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – MIDNIGHT

You know how it is for starving artists, right? I mean, look at your clothes. Anyway, it used to be even harder! So hard that some of them turned to a life of crime. This is especially true in the case of Arthur Malcolm. Down on his luck, Arthur is caught robbing an apartment and loses his eye in the process. Once he’s healed he’s out on the streets and, brother, he is HEATED. Arthur sets about on a mad killing spree, gouging out the eyes of his victims with a spoon. He collects the eyes for his artwork, you see. This continues for some time with mixed results.

This film was directed by Kent Bateman, father of Jason and Justine, in the streets of a now long gone version of NYC. According to this film, it was a time when a hooker would approach a man covered in blood in the middle of the day in order to turn a trick. The good old days. In addition to this movie being totally batshit insane with a FIERCE mutant soundtrack, it’s a veritable snapshot of a city as nasty as they come. The performances are hammy and intense, like Easter dinner in a mental institution.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 19TH- 7:30PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

COMP USA Live is an experiment in digital performance. The COMP USA Live team tells stories that take place on the desktop computer itself and explores relationships between actor, audience, environment, and computer user. Utilizing a desktop armed with custom software, talented actors, the Internet, and a well hung green screen, COMP USA Live creates a stage unlike any other that came before.

DANCE GODDESS
dir. Hamid Khan, 1987
82 min, USA
In English.
In Urdu w/ English subtitles.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2 – 7:30 PM (English) – DIRECTOR Q&A !!
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 – 7:30 PM (Urdu)
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 10 PM (English)
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 22 – 7:30 PM (Urdu)
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 29 – 7:30 PM (Urdu) – DIRECTOR Q&A !!
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 29 – 10pm (English) – DIRECTOR Q&A !!

Over the years, the Grand Ballroom at 124 S. 3rd St. has played host to many a lost musical – the nearly-mythical ROCK N’ ROLL HOTEL, the dearly melancholic DOOMED LOVE – and now, it is with great pleasure that we announce the world premiere of a film orphaned for 30 years…Hamid Kahn’s DANCE GODDESS.

After moving to America and having a successful career as a real estate attorney, Hamid found he missed the culture of India, particularly the movies and music. He dreamed of making the first American Bollywood movie, and so he wrote, produced, and directed DANCE GODDESS. Sparing no expense, he hired the best cinematographer, best dancers, and obtained permits to shoot scenes all over the city. To market the film internationally, all of the original actors dubbed their lines in both English and Urdu, and Kahn filmed alternate versions of every song in both languages. We will be presenting both versions of the film throughout the month.

The film follows Julie, who arrives at New York City’s Kahn Dance Studios from London with but a simple dream – to be the greatest dancer in the world. She has a fire in her heart and believes with the right connections, she won’t need luck. Julie immediately strikes a rapport with lead dancer Mike…much to the chagrin of Mike’s dance partner and secret/not-so-secret girlfriend and weed addict Maggie. Julie and Mike mesh so well from the jump they begin singing the film’s first song, “Dream On”, to the applause of their classmates. Has Doc (the director himself, Hamid Kahn) found his proverbial DANCE GODDESS?, he wonders aloud. Soon, Julie finds herself embroiled in a struggle between her heart’s desires (Mike) and her dreams (dance). Why can’t she have both, she wonders aloud a number of times? With the help of Doc, Julie meets up with Jack – a famous producer – who promises to get her all the way to Broadway.

DANCE GODDESS hits the ground twirling (ever twirling) around 80’s Manhattan with a huge dance sequence taking place in the middle of Times Square (“It’s the heart of New York!” Mike tells Julie), complete with gawking tourists and rubbernecking locals. Marvel at the marquees of long lost theaters advertising hits like THE LOST BOYS, DISORDERLIES, WARRIOR OF SHAOLIN, THE TORMENTORS, and more! Delight in typefaces gone by and cheer for banks that no longer exist. The fashions, the passions, and the beat of the city abound in DANCE GODDESS’ all-singing, all-dancing kaleidoscope.

We’re pleased to announce director Hamid Kahn will be on hand for several screenings for an intro and Q&A about the film.

Special thanks to the director and to David Ginn without whom this would not have been possible.

Boy, it’s a hot one. This August, Spectacle is pleased to celebrate (?) the dog’s-breath days of summer by exhibiting three unsung classics of criminality in the (dehydrated, varicose) vein of 2013’s OUT IN THE STREETS series. Shove the money under your mattress, grab a jumbo seltzer and put your halfway-broken piece of crap phone in airplane mode – because in the words of a longtime Spectacle volunteer: it’s not the heat… it’s the humanity.

KEEP COOL
dir. Zhang Yimou, 1997
China. 90 mins.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 6 – 5 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 15 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 25 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 27 – 7:30 PM

A tale of luck, hate and perhaps also love in a hot place, KEEP COOL straddles the distance between Zhang Yimou’s early arthouse and later crowd-pleasing sensibilities – a deranged pop-romance shot entirely on location in the sweltering, hypermodernizing streets of Beijing. Jiang Wen (an accomplished filmmaker himself, and mainland China’s biggest movie star at the time) stars as Shuai, a real-life bookthug whose ambitions are way above his overhead. After falling in love with a gangster’s moll named An Hong (played by Qu Ying), Shuai hatches a scheme to win her over – but only before An Hong mysteriously vanishes. Making the first non-historical film of his career, you’d never guess this is the same director who would square Matt Damon off against goblins two decades later on THE GREAT WALL: KEEP COOL ping pongs from scabrous black comedy to biting, insistent humanism. Every sensation tingles: the revving of a motor scooter, the striking of a match, the splash of a bucket of icewater dumped from a twenty storey apartment building. Even though it was censored by Chinese authorities and probably owes a little something to Wong Kar-Wai’s collaborations with Christopher Doyle, what really sticks is the antic nature of Zhang’s camera – free-wheeling yet moored by consequence, the characters’ fortunes shifting on a dime.

“Cutting is jagged, asymmetric, and discontinuous, not the serene conventional pattern Yimou heretofore employed. Imagine David Lean taking ten tabs of acid and turning himself into Richard Lester in his Beatles period and you have some notion of how astonishingly risky this new film is. What amazes most about KEEP COOL is finally how funny and human it is.” – Larry Gross, BOMB

DOG DAY
(aka CANICULE)
dir. Yves Boisset, 1984
France/United States. 100 mins.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 9 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 17 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 21 – 19 Pm

Lee Marvin probably looked weatherbeaten from womb to tomb – but in one of his very final roles, Hollywood’s last no-bullshit leading man crawls to the finish line with his dignity just-barely intact. DOG DAY (or CANICULE/”heatwave” in its language of origin) is a wild, gnarly piece of work – a European financed crime thriller starring Marvin as Jimmy Cobb, a bank robber-flaneur on the run in Normandy with one last job’s worth of greenbacks. What’s interesting is the way Cobb recedes into the background as his farm-family keepers begin to debate over what to do with him: the mashing up of hard-boiled noir tropes (vis-a-vis Marvin, who more than a few critics presumed got a hefty tax break for his trip to France) and rural ensemble drama (embodied by Jessica, a bored young sexpot played my the inimitable Miou-Miou) will keep you guessing what kind of film DOG DAY wants to be. The answer, in the end, is a bloodbath: Cobb’s inevitable trudge towards death approaches the seriocomic as nearly everybody else is massacred, giving the film a ruthlessness that would never make it out the gate of a Hollywood studio.

PIZZA BIRRA FASO
dirs. Adrián Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro
Argentina. 93 minutes.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 10 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 15 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 28 – 10 PM

“Four friends. One city. One single exit.” Adrián Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro’s extraordinary PIZZA BIRRA FASO (translating roughly to PIZZA, BEER AND SMOKES – but what kind of smokes?) is a major work of Spanish-language cinema, a cornerstone of New Argentine cinema that was sadly never released in the states. Shiftless teens Pablo, Frula, Magabom and El Cordobés eke out a living committing pick-up robberies on behalf of a cab driver (who then docks their pay) in the slums of Buenos Aires; the film chronicles their attempts to survive hand-to-mouth, and Cordobés’ flirtations with going straight – moving to Uruguay and starting his own small-time crime syndicate. If you can believe it (this being a film with the balls to straight up restage a sequence from Buñuel’s LOS OLVIDADOS), fate has other plans.

Like Victor Gaviria’s RODRIGO D: NO FUTURO and Teresa Villaverde’s OS MUTANTES, PIZZA BIRRA FASO debut sees the spirit of neorealism gone neoliberal: the film diagnoses a particular strain of disenchantment among teenagers in the shadow of congolomeratized capitalism, trapped in poverty while their home cities only get richer. Made when Caetano and Stagnaro were only just in their early twenties, PIZZA BIRRA FASO uses a lightweight handheld camera to create a fast-paced atmosphere that’s itinerant, jittery, claustrophobic. This is a tough, depressing film whose listless aesthetic embodies its characters’ dissatisfaction in total, only to belie the humanism held, until the unforgettably bleak finale, by the filmmakers at arm’s length.