Pick of the Week:

No contest, The Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square is screening George Romero's "The Crazies" (1973) tomorrow night at 9:30pm EDT. Its cheap, the acting is uneven (at least one major role is played by an academic renowned for his biography of Orson Welles), the special effects are threadbare and its still one of the scariest movies of the 1970's. A small town in Pennsylvania (is there any other setting for George Romero?) is the mass victim of a US Army biological agent that induces violent dementia among humans. The town descends into gruesome chaos as the Army enforces martial law and a brutal quarantine, none of which puts the police or the armed forces or the government in a very flattering light...or say nothing of remedying the situation. "The Crazies"is pretty much a free range vehicle for the Late Romero to explore his abiding suspicions about police/the armed forces/"the governments" ability to avoid bungling a real crisis....the movie remains scary even today because we've all seen in our own lives how quickly and easily things can go wrong and stay wrong. These are all unpopular themes even today (when is the last time you saw an American Movie just walk away from the prospect of a heroic police or armed forces type character?)...they may seem harsh but they are worthy of exploration all the same.

Le Roi d' Crazy is Dead...

Its not that the Late Jerry Lewis was Part of the American Zeitgeist, he really WAS The American Zeitgeist...you can just start with his emeritus status as "The Last Man Out of Vaudeville" and then segue into his insanely popular partnership with Dean Martin, the break up, the solo movies, his own comedy production unit at Paramount, his invention of "video assist", "The Nutty Professor" into the 1963 television catastrophe "The Jerry Lewis Show" (two hours live on Saturday Night nuff' said), his own comic book....and then there is the percodan addiction, the "The Day the Clown Cried" and even "Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down?"...if that isn't Secular Omnipotence, What Is? The story goes that Woody Allen BEGGED Jerry Lewis to direct "Take the Money and Run", wisely Lewis counseled Allen to be his own director...follow his own ambition to it's logical conclusion. I mean who else DESERVED to be a "God in France??" Somewhere in there, even amidst his gruesome sexism & xenophobia, his famous short temper (the man literally had a fuse sputtering away on top of his head), his spotty tastelessness, his inability to cut his leading ladies in on the funny....there is an object lesson to all comedians on the sheer power and necessity of ambition, he is a living exhortation to all comedians high and low to integrate, write perform and dominate the creative process. And yet right up to the end, Jerry Lewis repeatedly demonstrated the darkest most instructive moment was maybe the last ten seconds before the explosive bolts that held his psyche together detonated and the furies out of Heaven flew out of his head. A lot of THAT went down on the MDA Labor Day Telethons.... If Jerry broke hearts, if he fell short of his own transcendent ambitions, if he failed quite literally, its all in the shadow of his monumental success, from a lowly MC on the vaudeville circuit to an Apex Predator in Hollywood...top that well...anyone. Boston is still a "Movie Theatre Town". It is inevitable that the HFA or the MFA or some likewise outfit will execute a comprehensive Jerry Lewis Retrospective. So I serve fair warning to all and sundry that the programmers of said notional retrospective would be well served to secure local writer, critic & Lewis Aficionado Betsy Sherman as their curator....she has an insight into Lewis worth cultivating.

The Pleasures of CounterProgramming...

Last Month, Channel Zero sold out the micro-cinema of the Somerville Theater with a screening of an uber obscure Filipino super heroine film "Darna: The Return" (1994) fourteenth in a successful franchise stretching back to 1951. Well...we had help....Who Knew Boston had a Filipino Community eager to see some of their native cinema on a local screen?? Turns out one of our flyers got tweeted out on Instagram and WHAMMO instant "virulence". My point is, sometime this fall, the Mighty Harvard Film Archive is doing a "1970's Filipino Cinema Retrospective" curated by one Lav Diaz. I doubt the HFA will trifle with genre films, despite the fact that the Philippines in the 1970's produced a steady stream of ribald comedies, police thrillers, super hero & heroine movies, martial arts flicks and lurid horror films...nope it'll be heavy drama as usual. Unless of course they elect to surprise us...Just Remember not matter what Channel Zero Got There First!! Doesn't matter if we are filling 31 seats or 333 seats, we used our small size and rapid decision making powers to out program an apex predator...and for what? Why boasting rights or else why make the effort? Look, if the HFA screens anything good I'll be there for sure, I'm a fool not to go, and the experience will be all the more pleasurable with the knowledge that Channel Zero beat em' to it!